Random Most Bizarre Historical Artifacts Ever Discovered On Construction Sites (16 items)

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  (#2) A 700-Year-Old Mummy Was Found Under A Chinese Road

  In 2011, a very well-preserved mummified woman was found underneath a modern road in the city of Taizhou, in the Jiangsu Province of eastern China. The woman, a member of the Ming Dynasty, was found by a construction crew working on a road that she was buried under. Construction workers described her as being submerged in a "‘brown liquid." 

  She was just under five feet tall, and dressed in silk finery with robes, slippers, jewelry. Amazingly, her hair and eyebrows were still intact. After observing her and her tomb, Taizhou Museum director Wang Weiyin estimated that the mummy was about 700 years old. 
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  (#5) A 13th Century Mansion Was Found Under Somerset, England

  In 2013, during construction for a housing development in Wellington, England, excavators discovered the foundations of a 12th-century mansion. Archeologists working on the discovery later discovered that there were no historical records of the building. Normally, large estates have deeds and other records kept by the occupants, local lords, or with church officials. 

  While no sufficient information about the mansion’s history or occupants has ever been found, archeologists did discover a segment of tile in the mansion with a knight painted on it. Because this is similar to tiles at Glastonbury Abbey, this revelation made the site and mansion foundations instantly more important and of great historical value. While the housing project continued, the artifacts uncovered from the archeological dig ended up being moved to the Museum of Somerset for study and preservation. 
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  (#14) An 18th Century Cemetery Was Found At A Site For A New Orleans Swimming Pool

  In 2011, Vincent Marcello was prepared to find remains when he wanted to build a new pool, and so decided to hire archeologist Ryan Gray to dig in the area before construction began. 

  As all involved suspected, Gray did find human remains. In fact, he uncovered 15 wooden coffins where the new pool was to be installed. It turns out that these dearly departed were interred in the larger Saint Peter Cemetery of New Orleans. This was not surprising to anyone (insanely) because bones and whole skeletons were unearthed in the '80s during another building project nearby. With the utmost care and respect, Gray’s team sent all coffins and human remains, as found, to Louisiana State University to be studied and cared for. 
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  (#9) Around Two Dozen Coffins Were Found Under A Philadelphia Apartment Building

  In March 2017, construction crews working on an apartment complex in Philadelphia unearthed scores of fully intact human remains and coffins. It's speculated that the remains are from the 18th century, as the nearby Betsy Ross House was allegedly an old burial ground for the First Baptist Church.

  When the church moved sometime around 1860, they were supposed to exhume and re-inter all of their parishioners remains. Clearly, they cut some corners. The remains discovered were sent to the forensics lab at Rutgers-Camden, with the hope of identifying them, cleaning them, and analyzing them. The ultimate resting place (after documentation) is Mount Moriah Cemetery. 
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  (#16) An Unexploded WW2 Era RAF Bomb Was Uncovered In Berlin

  During the Second World War, Allied bombing campaigns dropped a total of 3.4 million tons of explosives. A lot of those bombs, possibly as many as 15 percent, didn’t detonate. They simply disappeared during reconstruction efforts after the war was over. As a result, many countries in Europe and Asia continue to find unexploded ordnance underneath buildings and other public places. 

  On Christmas Day 2016 in the Schwabian city of Augsburg in Bavaria, a four-thousand pound (two ton) RAF bomb from World War Two was discovered underneath a construction site. This forced the evacuation of 54,000 local inhabitants.
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  (#6) A 17th Century African Burial Ground Was Found In Manhattan

  History is often obscured by the fog of time and, more literally, rubble. In 1991, plans to build a new federal building in lower Manhattan began with excavation just north of the Tweed Courthouse in what is now Chinatown.  

  As excavation progressed, workers discovered a seventeenth century burial ground where African people, enslaved in what was then the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, had been continually interred for about century, between the 1690s and the 1790s. The site sits between Broadway and Centre Street, near Thomas Paine Park. 

  Once discovered, the building construction was stopped and further archeological excavation of the site unearthed the remains. Some individuals were even identified, notably Groot Manuel, who was identified by his living descendant, Christopher Moore. 

  Two years later, the site was recognized as a national historic landmark. A decade later, the remains of over a dozen individuals were ceremoniously reburied, and in 2006 President George W. Bush proclaimed the area a national monument. The discovery and preservation of the burial ground is of huge importance to both African-American history and American history as a whole. 

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