Field technician Archaeologist Krista Parker is crouched beneath a tent about six feet below street level the old Vanderburgh County courthouse looming above.
She’s using a small trowel to scrape inside the corner of a rectangular hole in the clay soil.
“I'm just trying to outline the grave shaft as best as possible so we can see everything — even if it is potentially smaller than this, you want to do your best to get everything,” she said.
CRA, or Cultural Resource Analysts, were hired by the Evansville Water and Sewer Utility city to investigate human remains excavated during the underground infrastructure project at Vine and Fourth Streets.
The remains were in a brick burial vault estimated to be from the early 1800s which have been moved and will eventually be re-buried elsewhere.
Since then, the remains of several more individuals have been located, likely part of the old McGarry Cemetery. The exact boundaries of the cemetery are unknown.
“Especially if you're working in a downtown area, and an older city, but this is not uncommon,” said Alexandra Bybee with CRA. She is heading up the dig. Since the first remains of an adult was found, they’ve since found the burial locations of infants and several adults.
She started unearthing skeletal remains on Monday, and by Tuesday one individual was mostly uncovered. She gestured to the skeleton still partially encased in clay.
“You see, we have the skull here it's collapsing in, it's very poorly preserved, then you can actually see the vertebrae, and you can see the arms, you can see how the the hands are crossed here,” she said. “And then the legs are extended down through there, I haven't finished down towards the foot.”
The bones are closer to the color or burnt charcoal than the ivory color you’d expect.
“Because they've been sitting in this soil for so long, and it's very clay soil,” Bybee said. “There's a lot of disintegration. And it's just that discoloration comes from just the process of decomposition.”
She said everyone is buried with their heads to the west — typical of a Christian burial of that era. This could be due to the belief that the dead would rise with the sun in the east and ascend to heaven on judgement day.
The other grave locations are covered in plastic, ready to be excavated. The archaeologists could tell there was a burial vault beneath just because of the dirt, said Andrew Martin, principal investigator at CRA.
“During the during the excavation work, you can see this the outline of the coffin shaft, the grave shaft. And once you see that, I mean you have to assume that there's likely a grave at the bottom of that.”
Victoria Swenson is from the CRA Knoxville Tennessee Office. She’s screening the grave shaft soil, or coffin soil to check for nails or any mortuary goods that might have been buried with the individual.
“We haven't found anything so far because it is a pioneer cemetery,” she said. “But sometimes you can find buttons, maybe a comb, dentures, stuff like that.”
The underground infrastructure work is carrying on as CRA does their work. They hope to be finished excavating by the end of this week. All the remains they unearth will be analyzed, said Bybee.
“… we'll look for age, sex, stature, pathology, trauma, and try to give a little bit more information about these early people, because we don't have any records of them,” Bybee said. “We don't know who anybody is, the likelihood of actually finding an identification for anybody is really, it's really low, but we need to find out, you know, who will find out as much as we can about them, biologically.”
As they work, they keep the remains covered out of respect and aren’t allowing photos even of the other brick vault they found. Bybee is asking that anyone nearby respect the grave sites, and stay a respectful distance.
“This is the earliest pioneers for Evansville,” she said. “So telling their story as much as we can, from what we can find, you know, there's not a whole lot left, and we don't know what else we'll find, but it's a, you know, that's an important part of it telling the story is that it's Evansville history. It's so It's everybody's history.”
