Archaeology at St. Peter Street Cemetery

Closely Spaced Coffins at St. Peter Street Cemetery During 2011 Excavations. Courtesy of ESI and UNO ARC.

Burials from the St. Peter Street Cemetery have been recovered by archaeologists on two occasions.  The first was by accident in 1984, when an unknown number of graves were disturbed by construction before authorities were notified.  

Archaeological excavations in both 1984 and 2011 confirmed just how full the cemetery had been: coffins were closely packed, with shafts from new graves often intersecting or located on top of earlier ones.  In many cases, skeletal materials from disturbed earlier graves were thrown back into new graves on top of coffins by eighteenth century grave diggers.