Contractors for the city department of design and construction (DDC) uncovered the first vault on Tuesday, during excavations to replace a century-old water main on the east side of the park, in the heart of bustling Greenwich Village. The workers called an archaeologist contracted by the city, who opened a way into the chamber only 3.5ft beneath the sidewalk.
Inside they found an arched brick chamber with skulls, femurs and other bones littered on the dirt floor.
The first vault was actually a rediscovery: power company ConEdison first uncovered the vault in 1965, finding 25 skeletons inside. Before this week’s excavation archaeologists knew the tomb existed, but were not sure where thanks to the company’s poor record-keeping.
“It’s the second vault we didn’t expect,” Alyssa Loorya, an archaeologist contracted by the DDC told the Guardian. Late Thursday she and her colleagues with Chrysalis Archaeology, a company that works with the city on such projects, found an identical chamber slightly south of the vault.
In contrast to the first, disturbed chamber, the second vault contains about 20 wooden coffins, at least some with name and date plates bolted on their sides. They are built identically: 15ft wide, 27ft long and an estimated 8ft from ceiling to floor. In the second vault a wooden door with diagonal slats guards the room, hanging by iron or copper hinges, its lock apparently intact.
DDC commissioner Feniosky Peña-Mora said the archaeologists are proceeding with caution – “we don’t want to do any more disturbing than we need to” – and have no plans yet to enter the chamber or move the bodies. City policy at archaeological sites is to leave remains in place, whenever possible, out of respect for the dead.
But Peña-Mora noted tantalizingly that it’s not clear where the vault doors, facing westward under the park, even lead.
For now researchers will continue to work from a distance with high-resolution cameras, telescope lenses and possibly a boom stick to get new angles on the remains and coffins.
“Of the images we’ve processed so far, we’re able to make out the beginning of a year of 18,” Loorya said. “Of course no further than that – yet.”
She added that with photos of a high enough resolution, archaeologists could glean a range of biological information. “You can get enough resolution to see dental wear patterns, suture closings on bones,” she said, in addition to “indicators of age and sex” and signs of disease.