They have so far counted about 12 skulls among the disarticulated skeletons of the first chamber, but have yet to process all the images from both vaults.
Now a leafy centerpiece of lower Manhattan, surrounded by university buildings and bars and recognized for its huge arch and fountain, the plain where Washington Square Park stands was a graveyard in the early 19th century. Not long after the revolutionary war the area served as a potter’s field for the poor and criminals of New York, most buried without ceremony or headstone.
Loorya said her team is for now dating the vaults during this period of the early 19th century, noting that before the cemetery was leveled in 1826 and declared a parade ground, churches bought plots adjacent to the field.
Only a few years earlier the site also served as a final resting place for victims of a yellow fever epidemic. In the early 1800s city lawmakers decreed that no church could bury its dead below Grand Street, pushing churches to claim plots near the field. There is no definitive documentation of how many people are buried under the park and neighborhood, Loorya said.
Human remains and gravestones periodically turn up around New York, and some estimate there are thousands of dead beneath the city. Bryant Park was similarly used as a potter’s field in the 19th century, though the remains there were eventually moved.
The most likely church to own the Washington Square plot, Loorya said, was the Cedar Street Presbyterian church, a congregation that splintered off from the Scotch Presbyterians in the late 18th century. But the church has no official records, she said, leaving the researchers to hope that a pastor may have kept personal records when he moved upstate.
“We’ve actually started making a timeline of events, and like a flow chart to try and track it,” she said.
“Like CSI,” Peña-Mora joked. He added more solemnly: “It’s our responsibility to makes sure this doesn’t happen again 100 years, or 50 years from now.”
The DDC has closed off the site to vehicles and pedestrians and is redesigning its project to accommodate the dig, department spokesperson Shavone Williams said. The department and researchers know the northern boundary of the cemetery but not its southern one, meaning there is an outside chance of more tombs under the street.
Loorya said the site is significant but added that artifacts and burials are scattered under the city often in well-preserved form, especially in the southern, older neighborhoods of Manhattan. South Street Seaport, for instance, has for years been treated as an archaeological site, and in the ruins of the World Trade Center workers found the remains of a 17th century ship.
“Despite massive amounts of disturbance from utilities, even subway installations, we still find pockets of either disturbed or undisturbed materials,” Loorya said.
Article Appeared @http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/nov/07/new-york-city-burial-vaults-washington-square-park