A man in Corbeil-Essonnes, France, discovered a skeleton in his cellar while pursuing a renovation project. But that was just the beginning. ‘Tis the spooky season, I guess.
By the time archaeologists were finished digging, they’d found 37 more skeletons under the house—and 10 plaster sarcophagi, or coffins. It turns out the home might have been built on an old cemetery that’s estimated to be over 1,500 years old.
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The skeletons and sarcophagi weren’t just randomly sitting around, like some horror film. Rather, they were buried in parallel rows, suggesting the site was once a proper burial site. This was just one of many strange findings in the area.
“This owner is not the first in the neighborhood to make a macabre discovery,” reported Archeodunum, an archaeological investigative center that assisted at the site. “The presence of an early medieval cemetery in this area has long been known.”
Their report continued: “Several plaster sarcophagi, typical of this period, have been discovered since the 19th century. Scholars then assumed that these burials were linked to the Notre-Dame-des-Champs chapel, which was supposedly built in the 7th century on a pagan temple honoring a spring. But there is no trace of these constructions, and the burials in this cemetery had never been the subject of scientific study until now.”
This new discovery proves the cemetery in his cellar is older than 19th-century scholars had originally believed. In fact, it was around “well before the construction of the chapel.”
Now that they have access to these skeletons, specialists plan to study them in a lab and determine their sex, age of death, and living conditions, among other details of the burial itself.
“More generally, the aim is to gain a better understanding of the population that lived here during Antiquity and the Middle Ages, but also to understand the evolution of funeral traditions during these periods,” Archeodunum wrote. “The results will be presented in a well-documented excavation report.”
