JACKSON, MISSISSIPPI—The Clarion-Ledger reports that as many 7,000 people may be buried on the University of Mississippi Medical Center campus. The deceased are thought to have been patients of the Mississippi Asylum for the Insane, which stood on the property from 1855 to 1935. In 2013, 66 coffins were uncovered during road construction, and a ground-penetrating radar survey before the construction of a parking garage in 2014 detected another 2,000 coffins. Because the burials rest in areas where the school is considering additional construction work, officials may exhume the burials and create a memorial, visitors’ center, and a lab where the remains and artifacts could be studied. “It would make Mississippi a national center on historical records relating to health in the premodern period, particularly those being institutionalized,” commented Molly Zuckerman of Mississippi State University’s Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures. To read about a very different sort of discovery made in Mississippi, go to “Not Quite Ancient.”
