DUBLIN, IRELAND—The disarticulated remains of victims of the Great Cholera Epidemic of 1832 have been unearthed in northern Dublin during the construction of a new line on the Luas light rail system. According to The Irish Times, most of those who died in Dublin during the outbreak were buried in a cemetery near the seventeenth-century Royal Hospital in Kilmainham, but there was not enough space there to meet the need, and an overflow burial ground was opened. That cemetery, however, was moved in the 1870s when the Midlands Great Western Railway at Broadstone was extended. “I think that is what we are looking at,” said principal archaeologist Maria Fitzgerald. “It’s just all the bones placed in what we think is a trench going down the center of the site. There seems to be quite a few burials; we have come across quite a number of skulls,” she said. Fitzgerald and her team are working with the designers of the new train line to try to preserve the bones where they are now. To read more about archaeology in Ireland, go to “Mystery of the Fulacht Fiadh.”
