4. An 18th-Century Cemetery when Digging for a New Orleans Swimming Pool
In 2011, Ryan Gray was conducting a test dig in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana. It was in preparation to install a pool, and on the last day of digging, Gray hit a piece of wood: a coffin. That coffin was the first step towards rediscovering the St. Peter Street Cemetery, the city’s first formal burial ground.
Thirteen coffins and two standalone bodies were lifted from the site and sent to a forensics lab at Louisiana State University, where they discovered that the 15 skeletons were all of different ages and genders. They also found the oldest dental filling in Louisiana in one of the males. The fascinating discovery, however, was that every person buried was of African or Native American descent.