20 Astonishing Things Found Buried Beneath Old City Streets

Richard III, the last Plantagenet king of England, died in battle in 1485 and was hastily buried by Franciscan friars in a grave too short for his corpse. The friary disappeared over the next few centuries, and a parking lot eventually covered the site. In 2012, archaeologists digging in the parking lot uncovered a skeleton with a curved spine and battle wounds that DNA testing subsequently identified as Richard III’s.

In London, St. Pancras Old Church buried victims in mass graves during epidemics in the 1800s. When construction crews were digging the site before extending a railroad line, they unearthed one casket containing bones from eight individuals as well as fragments of a 13-foot Pacific walrus. The bones of the walrus had clear knife marks from being cut apart for study, proving it was not someone’s beloved pet. Researchers think medical students just tossed their old specimen into a shared burial pit.

In Derinkuyu, Turkey, a town in the region of Cappadocia, there are rooms that were originally chiseled out of the area’s soft volcanic rock by the Phrygians in antiquity. They were further excavated and enlarged over the centuries by Byzantine Christians, who built a defensive city 18 levels deep. It contained stables, chapels, wine presses, and ventilation shafts, and could house 20,000 people. Locals continued to use the upper levels of the underground complex for generations, but the scope of the construction remained unknown until a homeowner penetrated a basement wall and discovered endless tunnels.

Africans in colonial Manhattan weren’t allowed to be buried within the city limits, so they buried over 15,000 of their enslaved and free dead on a small tract of land just beyond the walls. By the time developers broke ground for a federal office building in 1991, the area had been buried under landfill. Excavators found the graves intact, 30 feet down. After archaeologists recovered the bones of 419 Africans, many showing signs of physical trauma from heavy labor, protests brought the dig to a halt and preserved the ground as a National Monument.

In Jacobean times, Cheapside was the heart of London’s jewelry trade. In 1912, when workmen were demolishing a cellar there, they came across a wooden box rotted to the touch. Inside were nearly 500 pieces of jewelry, including gold chains, diamond rings, and a gold and enamel watch fitted with an elaborately carved Colombian emerald. It seems a jeweler had hidden his entire stock when England’s Civil War broke out. By the time he was able to retrieve it, he had passed away.

The Byzantine emperor Justinian I ordered the construction of a massive cistern to protect his city’s water supply in the 500s CE. The vast underground chamber in Constantinople once held tens of thousands of cubic meters of water on a foundation of 336 marble columns in rows. It was lost after the Ottoman conquest and only rediscovered when a scholar investigated after villagers said they were catching fish through holes in their cellars.

In the period between about AD 970 and 1025, Anglo-Saxons and marauding Scandinavian Vikings waged war over the southern coastline of England. In 2009, workmen laying the Weymouth Relief Road in Dorset struck upon an ancient Roman quarry pit, in which lay a mass grave consisting of 54 beheaded men. The vast majority of the men’s heads lay piled away from their bodies. Chemical tests on their teeth revealed that every one of them grew up in Scandinavia, while marks on their neck vertebrae indicated that they were killed from behind, rather than dying in combat.

In the late 1800s, the Pioneer Square neighborhood of Seattle was at sea level on mudflats, so sewage would back up whenever the tide rose. Then a great fire swept through much of downtown. Instead of rebuilding at ground level, civic leaders built the new streets higher with retaining walls and fill dirt, and property owners rebuilt in brick above. The original storefronts at street level were left intact below and were accessible from the sidewalk via ladders, until the city banned the ladders.

Back in the late 18th century, New York real estate speculators got a little creative about extending Manhattan into the Hudson River, using ship hulls stripped of anything useful and filled with stones as landfill. In 2010, a crew digging close to Ground Zero under Greenwich Street struck one of these hulls. Dating the wood rings from the timbers indicated they came from trees that grew in Philadelphia. It was a Dutch-style trading sloop, intentionally scuttled to expand the land, rather than shipwrecked.

When London’s regular churchyards were full, a medieval knight, Sir Walter Manny, purchased a field outside the city walls in 1348 to use as an emergency burial ground. When Crossrail workers dug up Charterhouse Square recently, they found skeletons buried in two neat rows. Not a single body was jumbled with another. Dental DNA testing on the skeletons confirmed infection with the bacterium that caused the Black Death. Radiocarbon dating indicated the burials took place right at the beginning of the epidemic.

Chicago’s downtown area was situated on wetlands and swampy, low-lying land in the 1850s, and cholera swept through the city, killing a significant portion of the population due to inadequate drainage. Ellis S. Chesbrough, an engineer, designed the first comprehensive sewer system in North America. Since the water table was too high for digging trenches, his team installed pipes along the surface of the city streets and then covered them with fill, raising the ground level. Some structures were lifted accordingly; some retained their original ground-level stories as basements.

The Roman emperor Hadrian, who ruled in the 2nd century CE, oversaw many construction projects throughout Rome. While workers were digging a new subway line, the Rome Metro C, they discovered a massive barracks complex built during Hadrian’s reign. The barracks have rooms with mosaic floors. And nearby, the workers uncovered an apartment complex built for regular Romans. Both of these buildings date to Hadrian’s reign, not to the Roman Republic.

Known in antiquity as the thriving city of Thessalonica (now Thessaloniki, Greece), this major crossroads connected Rome’s holdings in Europe and Asia. Between 2012 and 2018, workers constructing a subway station 18 feet below Venizelou Street stumbled upon the Decumanus Maximus, a fourth-century marble avenue with drainage channels, covered porticoes and storefronts that contained coins and oil lamps. Instead of excavating it, engineers adapted their subway plan around the ancient thoroughfare; it remains intact on its original site.

Tsar Alexander I was emperor of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars, and he was responsible for rebuilding Moscow after the fires that destroyed much of the city in 1812. The Neglinnaya River ran alongside the Kremlin walls before it became a polluted stream that flooded every spring. Military engineers eventually enclosed it in a brick vault and buried it under Neglinnaya Street, which was built over the old riverbed. It did not dry up, though; its current remains underground below the street.

The General Harrison was a merchant ship built in 1840. During California’s Gold Rush, crews abandoned hundreds of ships in San Francisco’s harbor to chase gold, and this one got turned into a floating warehouse instead. A fire raged through San Francisco and reduced the vessel to its waterline. As the city filled in its waterfront, the wreck was left behind and eventually covered by today’s streets. The ship was discovered by workers building a hotel in 2001, revealing an intact oak hull and Gold Rush cargo still in storage.

Stone arches once carried Edinburgh’s South Bridge across a valley, connecting the city’s different hills. But the bridge builders created chambers around their arches, and these were initially inhabited by cobbler shops and pubs. After water seeped in and the air grew stagnant, the tradespeople left, but soon the vaults were filled with impoverished immigrant families until the city blocked them off. Researchers re-excavated the vaults in the 1980s. Despite what the legend says, there’s no evidence that the murderers Burke and Hare ever inhabited the vaults.

After World War II, W.F. Grimes, the director of the Museum of London, spent his days excavating war-scarred sites in the capital. In September 1954, he dug into a bomb crater on Walbrook Street and found the stone base of a Roman temple dating to around 240 CE, where followers of Mithras, a cult favored by soldiers and merchants, had prayed. On the final day of digging, Grimes’s team fished out a marble head of Mithras from the debris. It was a sensation that attracted an estimated 400,000 visitors.

Long Island Rail Road constructed a long brick tunnel in 1844 underneath Brooklyn’s Atlantic Avenue to avoid placing the steam-powered trains on the surface. When steam locomotives were outlawed, the railroad sealed it off, and it became a New York legend. Many years later, engineering student Bob Diamond found it using old utility maps. He dropped into a manhole and smashed through a brick wall into the tunnel that was still intact. For many years, tours operated until the city decided they were too dangerous and shut them down.

In the first century, Pontius Pilate ruled over Roman Judea. In this era, laborers in Jerusalem constructed a large stone path that would carry pilgrims from the Siloam Pool up to the Temple Mount. A team of archaeologists excavating underneath the contemporary City of David unearthed the path, which was constructed out of thousands of tons of limestone. Coins minted by the Romans and found below the pavement stones belong to his reign, and they imply that the path was completed during his tenure as governor, some decades before Roman soldiers covered the road with debris.

The Roman historians Suetonius and Tacitus relate that Emperor Nero made his public appearance as a singer on the stage of a theater at Neapolis. It was a brick building, constructed under what is now Via dei Tribunali, which escaped destruction by Vesuvius. Medieval people simply built tenements over its exterior arcades. The Neapolitans still have access to the inner corridors and seats of the structure by way of staircases that lead down from the cellars of adjoining houses, or by pulling up a trapdoor which is concealed under the bed.

This content was created with the help of AI.