London's Skeletons Exposed

For years, the Museum of London has excavated over 15,000 skeletons from beneath the city. Now, 26 of the more remarkable ones are going on display at the Wellcome Trust.

You can find the full article here on the BBC, and it is quite interesting. I want to explain a little about how this comes to pass, though:

Historically, many sites are built and rebuilt on the grounds of similar structures. This is most notably true with churches and places of worship. In fact, many earlier cities have been found beneath newer ones, which often leads to errors and discrepancies in the dating of various features. In more extreme cases, this has given rise to superstitions and stories of lost civilizations, etc.

In America, a dominant theory regarding haunted locales has to do with whether or not American Indian burial mounds lay beneath the structure(s). While American Indians were very spiritual and held their burial mounds in deep regard, and the desecration of burial sites is often tied to the concepts of horror and the paranormal, one of the key elements in this concept is that settlers did not necessarily disregard the American Indians' burial sites, they literally did not know they were burial sites!

They did, however, commit wanton genocide.

© C Harris Lynn, 2008