Between 2010 and 2012, archaeologists dug beneath the Old Divinity School at the University of Cambridge’s St. John’s College while the building was being refurbished. What they found was BONES, BONES, BONES.
Craig Cessford/Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology
In total the team found 400 complete sets of skeletal remains and partial remains of as many as 1,000 other individuals. From a press release announcing the findings:
While the existence and location of the cemetery have been known to historians since at least the mid-twentieth century, the sheer scale and extent of the burial ground was unclear until now.
The bodies, which mostly date from a period spanning the 13th to 15th centuries, are burials from the medieval Hospital of St John the Evangelist which stood opposite the graveyard until 1511, and from which St John’s College takes its name.
The idea of a medieval hospital is funny, because what did doctors really have to do when there was no such thing as science? We’re talking about a “hospital” that closed 176 years before Newton published the theory of gravity. A better name for that hospital would have been “future corpse intake warehouse.”
Anyhoo, bones.
Craig Cessford/Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology
Bones!
Craig Cessford/Cambridge University Department of Archaeology and Anthropology
We’ll all end up as bones.
