Grave answers: Burial site shows much about lives long ago By CHARLES WOLFE, Associated Press July 23, 2002 FRANKFORT KY The people whose remains were found in scores of unmarked graves at a state construction site are proving to have been a diverse group, researchers say. There were men, women and children, black and white. Most were poor but others were of some means, if not actually wealthy. Some may have been among Frankfort's first inhabitants. Some likely were workhouse and prison inmates. Many bear the telltale bone damage of tuberculosis and arthritis. Most lived a life of hard labor. "We're finding a surprising composition of men, women and children," Peter Killoran, one of the researchers studying the remains at a University of Kentucky archaeology laboratory, said in an interview. They were people of varied backgrounds, "all thrown into one place," said Killoran, who teaches at Northern Kentucky University but was invited to join the research project because his expertise is in the anthropological evidence a dig can yield. The site was barely two blocks from the old state Capitol. How so many graves, so near the center of town, could have become lost or obliterated remains a mystery. But Killoran said graves often were only rudely marked, if marked at all, in the early 1800s. The first of the graves, which date back perhaps 200 years, was discovered in March by workers leveling two downtown blocks to make room for a state office building. Archaeologists rushed to the site and began finding grave after grave. Killoran said 265 people may have been buried on the site over much of the 19th century. About a third were children. In addition, the nature of the cemetery itself seems to have changed over time. Killoran and other researchers have theorized that it may have begun as a community burial ground but ended as a potter's field for prisoners, debtors and wards of the state, since a workhouse and penitentiary once stood in the same area. The children probably died of infections, he said. Frankfort twice was ravaged by cholera, a disease whose victims would have looked fairly natural in death, Killoran said. Among the adults, researchers were finding evidence of long-term diseases, primarily tuberculosis lesions on spines, ribs and leg bones. One adult male showed evidence of Paget's disease, a crippling, hereditary bone disease. One woman had a kneecap that was "worn down to the bone" and a hip socket, which should have been golf ball size, as big as a grapefruit, Killoran said. She probably lived in constant pain, walked with a pronounced limp "and eventually probably was bed ridden," Killoran said. "These people obviously were working very hard and having diseases but also living through it a long time," he said. That also indicates that people were taking care of each other. "Some of these pathologies clearly were enough that they wouldn't have been able to work," Killoran said. The remains are being cleaned, cataloged and studied at the anthropology department -- a project expected to take two years. After that, the remains are to be returned to Frankfort for another burial, possibly in green space adjacent to the building under construction, a headquarters for the Kentucky Transportation Cabinet. The research work is being done with sensitivity. Said Killoran: "I look at it as sort of breathing life into people who perhaps weren't treated very well while they were alive." ========================= Protect Our Children & Prevent Domestic Abuse http://endabuse.org/programs/children/ Equal Employment Know Your Rights http://www.eeoc.gov/ Keep my daughter Tabitha and grandaughter Hallie in your prayers... "Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life. " Sophocles