Two skeletons, believed to belong to pioneers, have been found at Crystal Beach in Ontario, Canada.

They’re both close to each other and oriented in an east/west direction, which is kind of the method of a Christian burial,” said senior archeologist Martin Cooper.

“Right now, we’re leaning towards them being European, probably pioneer burial.”

A construction crew installing a natural gas line found several bones Tuesday while excavating near the road.

Niagara Regional Police and the coroner’s office were called in.

A second skeleton was found by an anthropologist, who conducted a forensic examination of the scene along with police forensic officers.

Cooper said one of the skeletons was disturbed during the excavation, but the other is relatively intact.

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Archaeologists are excavating a 700-year-old medieval hospital burial ground beneath a car park in South Yorkshire.

They know a hospital run by monks was on the site but there were no written records of burials from before the early 17th century.

But the skeletons of adults, children and babies have already been scientifically dated to the 14th century and one of them is a confirmed case of scurvy, a vitamin deficiency disease brought on by poor diet and common among impoverished people of that era.

Because Bawtry was an inland port during the 13th and 14th century it could be some of the remains may have belonged to foreigners.

“By analysing the remains over a period of time we will hope to find out more about their lives and how they died. It is possible they were not all local,” said Dr Hadley.

“Hospitals in medieval times were not like modern ones, in that they cared for people who were not necessarily sick, such as the elderly, waifs and travellers.”

The dig found no evidence of coffins or other artefacts, and the burials were all tightly packed together, with probably more underneath.

“It is difficult to tell how many burials were on this site but I would estimate around 100. They were only 1.2 metres below the surface of the old Masonic Hall car park,” said Dr Hadley.

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Two complete skeletons which may date back to medieval times were found by workmen in Gloucester, England.

The team was working on a £7m project to improve access between the city centre and the new Quays complex when the remains were unearthed on Tuesday.

The adult skeletons were uncovered, along with the remnants of a coffin, in the city’s Kimbrose Triangle.

They will not be displayed and will instead be given a respectful reburial after they are examined.

Nigel Edgeworth, manager for the Gloucester Linkages project, said: “We were putting in the foundations for a wall when we came across the two skeletons.

“The minute we go below half a metre we have an archaeologist watching us. It is very exciting from a historical point of view and adds more to the picture of Gloucester’s history.”

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The 13th century remains of an African has been found buried in England.

Forensics experts at the University of Dundee Scotland say that the bones most likely belonged to a man from modern-day Tunisia who spent about a decade living in England before he died.

“I believe that this is the first physical evidence of Africans in medieval England,” said Jim Bolton, a historian at Queen Mary, University of London who wasn’t involved in the discovery.

“Finding a skeleton like this is of major interest,” he said.

The man — who appears to have died of a spinal abscess — was identified as African by studying his skeleton and the historical record of the friary where he was buried.

“It’s not just the skin tone, it’s a question of bone structure,” said Xanthe Mallett, an expert at the Center for Anatomy and Human Identification in Dundee. She said the size of the nasal bone or the shape of the orbits differed depending on whether skeletons were European or African.

“You can have an idea of where somebody is from by looking at their skeletal features,” she said.

Researchers were able to pin the man to Tunisia using isotope analysis, a technique which looks at the mix of elements that build up in a person’s teeth, bones or other tissues. Since people from different areas tend to accumulate such elements in different ways, analysis of their remains can sometimes pinpoint where they grew up, where they lived or even their diet.

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Wired Science takes a look at some Incan skeletons which show how brutal the Spanish were.

Murphy’s team assessed skeletons of 258 Inca individuals, age 15 or older, excavated several years ago at the two cemeteries.

In one cemetery, bodies had been hastily deposited in shallow graves. One-quarter of 120 skeletons displayed head and body injuries inflicted at the time of death, as indicated by a lack of healed bone and other clues. That’s a conservative estimate, Murphy notes, since soft-tissue damage doesn’t show up on bones.

“I’m struck by the severity of violence in certain individual cases, where the skull was essentially crushed, repeatedly stabbed or struck, or shot through by gunshot,” comments archaeologist Steven Wernke of Vanderbilt University in Nashville. Whoever killed these individuals wanted to intimidate survivors as well, he asserts.

One man’s skull contained two holes and radiating fractures consistent with damage produced by early guns that shot ammunition at low velocities.

Another male skull sported three small rectangular openings in the back of the head. These injuries resemble those on skulls from a 1461 battlefield cemetery in England, Murphy says. Medieval weapons tipped with steel spikes or sharp beaks probably caused these wounds, she proposes.

Three other skeletons exhibited injuries likely due to Spanish weapons. Other skeletons contained head and body fractures probably inflicted by attackers bearing Inca weapons.

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