HUMAN remains have been discovered in John’s Square by construction workers involved with the upgrading of the area. Work came to a halt on Wednesday afternoon when a digger operator clearing ground for a drain, spotted something suspicious and stopped work. What he initially found was a skull, and the gardai were informed. At time of going to press, Limerick City Council were waiting for the arrival of a forensic archaeologist but, according to council sources, gardai are not treating the find as suspicious.
A senior engineer on-site said that the remains “appear to be a couple of hundred years old, although we’ll know more when the archaeologist has had time to examine them. From what we have been told, from the size of it, they think they are the remains of a woman”.
Gardai are not treating the find as suspicious.
The council had engaged the services of Limerick company Aegis Archaeology, before work began.
“There’s a lot of history connected with that area. The first breach in the walls during the Williamite war happened down around there, so there would have been a lot of people killed,” a council engineer said.
Other possibilities are that the remains have been there since famine times, or maybe from where they were previously buried in the nearby cemetery, as the boundary of that graveyard was moved back at one stage. But this would be the least likely explanation, given that they were shallowly buried.
“We had the archaeology company involved as this is quite an historic area and we expected that we might find remains,” the council engineer added.
The area was to be examined and the bones and any other finds excavated and taken away for archaeological research on Wednesday of this week.
