Now here is a true and very odd story about the county deciding to build on top of an old gravesite...

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At the time of her death and burial, there was no road, just what I assume was a grassy hill. Roughly 70 years she died, in the early 1900s, county officials decided they wanted to build a road in the same spot. Why they couldn't simply build around her grave, I don't know. The point is the decision was made, and the road was going to be built. Whether or not the crew responsible for building the road would have just gone over the top of her grave, or attempted to relocate her remains is unknown. That's because, as the legend goes, her grandson guarded her final resting place with a shotgun to make sure no one tried.

Grave in the Middle of the Road (festivalcountryindiana.com)

Read More: Indiana Fun Fact - A Franklin Woman is Buried in the Road | https://my1053wjlt.com/indiana-fun-fact-road-grave/?utm_source=tsmclip&utm_medium=referral

 

Indiana Fun Fact - A Franklin Woman is Buried in the Road (my1053wjlt.com)

What a grave situation to find oneself in ! 

This one is buried deep in the annals of time

Tony

Talk about a bump in the road . 

Building on a grave site is actually not that unusual. I'm an archaeologist by trade, and occasionally the department for heritage that I worked for might take the decision to leave buirals in the ground if we knew that they would not be disturbed by foundations or basement excavations. That was especially the case in developments where, for example, retail was proposed for a site which pretty much meant just laying down a concrete slab on which the shop would be built. We recorded the features for future reference, but actually more often than not whatever is already there is safer when left in the ground. There's a many a grave still under a supermarket in southwestern Germany 😉 And there's at least one almost complete Roman fortress under a district administration centre...

Residential developments were something else, as not all future house owners might be comfortable with the knowledge that there might be someone lurking in/under their basement. I blame the Poltergeist movies... (one time we did get the future residents of a housing development around for an open day event to explain why we were there and what we had discovered so far and it ended in a couple of the neighbours-to-be almost proudly comparing how many "bodies" they would have in their cellar (although this was one of the cases where we had to remove everything as the graves were in danger of being destroyed by the excavation works - so there was nothing there anymore, when the houses actually went up)).

 

In some cases designs might be changed and the features integrated in the finished projects. This is the site of the Merowingerhalle in Biengen which I worked on

 

and the half-round brick outline demarcates the edge of a burial mound from the early Middle Ages. That silvery thing with the glass plate inset is the central grave (now empty, of course) that people can look down into.

 

Here they incorporated the location of the burial mounds (note the central graves marked by the rectangular features) - and even "reconstructed" some of the mounds in the landscaping.

So - hats off to whoever planned that road in Indiana. They obviously wanted to get from A to B on the shortest route, but still respected the grave 🙂

Cheers

Mallard

1 hour ago, Mallard said:

I'm an archaeologist by trade, and occasionally the department for heritage that I worked for might take the decision to leave buirals in the ground if we knew that they would not be disturbed by foundations or basement excavations. That was especially the case in developments where, for example, retail was proposed for a site which pretty much meant just laying down a concrete slab on which the shop would be built. We recorded the features for future reference, but actually more often than not whatever is already there is safer when left in the ground. There's a many a grave still under a supermarket in southwestern Germany 😉 And there's at least one almost complete Roman fortress under a district administration centre...

 

Fascinating! After discovering "Time Team" a number of years ago and always watching old episodes while doing long-haul flights in the sim I've become really interested in archaeology to the point that had I been young I might have gone that route instead of the one I ended up with. 

However, I've got the feeling you brits have more interesting archaeology than here in the north of Sweden though. Seems like everywhere you put the shovel you find something. 

Now move the movie forward in the year 5021, after humanity painful reconstruction following the Great Disaster ( name your favorite, plague, nuke war, warming, locusts, whatever) . What will the archeologists of these times think of that ? What strange theories will they infer from finding bones in the middle of few cracked asphalt pieces whick look like there was a road ? 

Edited October 16, 20214 yr by Dominique_K

2 hours ago, Mallard said:

Building on a grave site is actually not that unusual. I'm an archaeologist by trade,

Thanks for a fascinating post. Great profession. You have specialized in the Merovingians  ?

Odd, because moving graves has not exactly been taboo around these parts. Southern Illinois has a lot of lakes, most of them man-made. There's one that highway 13 (oooh!) crosses between KMDH and KMWA (Crab Orchard Lake) where they moved a cemetery before flooding it. Or did they? (Poltergeist.)

4 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

What strange theories will they infer from finding bones in the middle of few cracked asphalt pieces whick look like there was a road ? 

"What strange people those primitives must have been to bury accident victims where they died!"

2 hours ago, n4gix said:

"What strange people those primitives must have been to bury accident victims where they died!"

You mean "how culturally challenging our long gone ancestors must have been etc. " ? 😋

Our own ancestors were burying their dead under the house hearth or even their beds about  9 millennia ago somewhere in Anatolia and we still don't understand why 😄 !

 

There are two graves under the runway at Savanah Airport,  The gravestones are embedded into the runway.

I think many roads and highways are built over grave sites along the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails.  People wo died along the way or were killed in Indian attacks were just buried on the spot with no caskets or permanent markers.  They just became part of the soil.

Noel

Edited October 16, 20214 yr by birdguy

They might see the burial as a ritual sacrifice to pacify the gods of the road... I've certainly encountered the one or the other "entertaining" theory about things that have been discovered in strange circumstances

10 hours ago, Swe_Richard said:

However, I've got the feeling you brits have more interesting archaeology than here in the north of Sweden though. Seems like everywhere you put the shovel you find something. 

Ah, now  - you Danes (if you call us Irish Brits, than I can call you Swedes Danes) 😉 also have a rich heritage! Thing is, you exported quite a bit of it all around northern Europe...

8 hours ago, Dominique_K said:

Thanks for a fascinating post. Great profession. You have specialized in the Merovingians  ?

Nope, I'm actually a pre-historian (we're the fellas who get to theorise even more eccentrically, as there are no written records to help us along). But when I worked for the state department I was on the clearance and rescue team. That meant dealing with whatever had to come out of the ground fast. When someone wants to build a home or developers plan a housing project or retail area they have to get the "all clear" from the department first. It looks at the site they want to build on and see if there's anything on record from that area. If something is found on file of a previous  discovery then it has to asess the risk of potential additional features popping up there. And if there's any concern we get sent out to clear the site first. Somehow I mostly ended up on housing developments that were planned on former cemeteries. My last tally was that in the three years that I worked for that department I got to excavate and document more than 400 graves (ranging from what we suppose was a chieftan who was buried together with his horse to a young woman with an infant and everything in between) - but I could also be called upon when someone discovered something somewhere by chance.

These tasks have nothing to do with the romantic image of an archaeologist carefully dusting off some artefacts with a little soft brush and humming and hawing about his discoveries, then lighting a pipe and contemplating his own existence in the context of the rest of the universe. That only happens of research excavations run by the universities. I was on a couple of those - an early Bronze Age smelting site in the French Alps, a lost castle that used to guard the entrance to one of the valleys in the Black Forest and the remains of a fortified house here in Dublin. But the rescue missions were quite a different kettle of fish alltogether. We had to be out in all weathers, sometimes even getting commiserations from the builders from neighbouring sites who were laying down their tools because they could not continue their work, while we kept slogging on. I once had to thaw the top levels of a grave with a gas burner, as the ground was frozen solid. I've also been just a couple of centimetres under a three-ton excavator shovel that kept on diging to the left and right of me while I documented and slavaged finds from the post hole of a Bronze Age house.

And - no - I never found gold... But all in all it was a lot of fun! Of course I could not make a living from the job (very few can), so after a stint in the records department I moved on.

Cheers

 

Mallard

I follow this guy on YouTube, he visited the site a couple months ago, this grave as bizarre as it looks seems to be tastefully and respectably done and with good intentions

 

9 hours ago, Mallard said:

we're the fellas who get to theorise even more eccentrically, as there are no written records to help us along)

Yes, it is somewhat amusing to see how much the politically correct ideas of today are influencing the paleontologists and prehistorians in their interpretations. I like to read people like JJ Hublin of Plancks as he keeps common sense in his thoughts.