16 Most Bizarre Historical Artifacts Found On Construction Sites

A letter from David to Santa Claus, dated Christmas 1943, was found in a chimney. Seventy-two years later, contractor Lewis Shaw's crew found the letter still inside the chimney while demolishing David's home. The letter read:

Dear Father Christmas,

Please send me a Rupert annual, a drum box of chalks, soldiers and Indians, slippers, and any little toys you have to spare,

Love

David

Miraculously, David reunited with his letter. Shaw searched for him using Facebook and talked to neighbors still nearby. The search started a social media campaign, #FindDavid. Shaw finally found the living David.

In 1850, a Parisian couple had work done in their apartment whenThe mummified remains of a baby fell out of a wall.First, suspicion fell on the couple. Dr. Marcel Bereget used common house flies to check the time since death by seeing if they swarmed the body. The test showed the child died long ago.

No one knew who the child was or how he or she died and ended up in the wall. The child likely stayed there for years.

In 2011, a well-preserved mummified woman was found under a modern road in Taizhou, Jiangsu Province, eastern China.The womanwas a member of the Ming Dynasty,was found by a construction crew digging under a road. Workers said she was submerged in a "brown liquid."

She was just underfive feet tall, dressed in silk finery with robes, slippers, and jewelry. Her hair and eyebrows remained intact. Taizhou Museum director Wang Weiyin estimated the mummy was about 700 years old after viewing her and her tomb.

Time often hides history under rubble. In 1991, plans to build a new federal building in lower Manhattan started excavation just north of the Tweed Courthouse in Chinatown.

As digging continued, workers found aseventeenth-century burial ground where African people, enslaved in the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, were buried continuously from the 1690s to the 1790s. The site sits between Broadway and Centre Street, near Thomas Paine Park.

Discovery stopped building. More archaeological digging unearthed the remains. Some people were identified, including Groot Manuel, who was identified by his descendant, Christopher Moore.

Two years later, the site earned national historic landmark status. A decade later, people reburied over a dozen remains. In 2006, President George W. Bush declared the area a national monument. This burial ground's discovery and saving matter greatly to African-American history and American history.

In 2013, excavators found foundations for a housing development in Wellington, England.The discovery involved a 12th-century mansion.Archeologists later found no records of the building. Large estates usually have deeds and records from owners, local lords, or church officials.

Archeologists found a tile with a knight painted on it in the mansion. This resembles tiles from Glastonbury Abbey. This finding made the site and mansion foundations much more important. The housing project continued, and the artifacts from the dig went to the Museum of Somerset for study and saving.

In 2015, construction workers found a 121-year-old time capsule in the Cairngorms National Park, Scotland, on the Ruthven Road bridge.

Opening the capsule revealed items: a bottle of whisky, an 1894 newspaper, a scroll, and other things. They gave the items and the box to the Highland Folk Museum for study. People believe they put the time capsule in the bridge structure when it was first built in the late 1800s.

The bubonic plague moved from Italy across Europe. Hospitals became overloaded with plague victims. Many shut down and abandoned when no doctors remained to treat the sick. In 2013,excavators unearthed the foundations of one hospital in Madrid.This happened as Spanish construction crews began digging for the new Apple Store planned for that spot.

The hospital dates to the 15th century. It treated people with the bubonic plague. It operated until the 19th century but closed and demolished in the 1850s.

Beneath the modern frame and foundation of a residential building in Seattle,A building in Seattle., aA single, fossilized tusk.ofMammuthus columbi., the Columbian Mammoth. Paleontologists examined the fossilized tusk found under the building; it measured over eight feet long.

Inspectors assessed the tusk as at least 60,000 years old; carbon dating is needed. AMLI, the building and land owner, deserves credit for asking paleontologists to remove and preserve the tusk. The tusk went to the Burke Museum of Natural History and Culture in Seattle.

In March 2017, construction crews working on a Philadelphia apartment complex unearthed many human remains and coffins.Crews unearthed fully intact human remains and coffins.Speculation suggests the remains date to the 18th century because the nearby Betsy Ross House was allegedly an old burial ground for the First Baptist Church.

When the church moved around 1860, they planned to exhume and re-inter all parishioners' remains. They cut corners. Forensics lab at Rutgers-Camden received the discovered remains for identification, cleaning, and analysis. Mount Moriah Cemetery is the final resting place after documentation.

Digging in Israel is hard.It is not.Along an ancient road, people find something of immense historic value.Workers found the remains of a 1,500-year-old Byzantine church.Construction workers found the church when they did routine maintenance on a modern highway near the church's location.

The church near Jerusalem had a white marble floor and a cruciform-shaped baptisterium, a small pool for baptism. Workers saved small items from road maintenance destruction, including mother of pearl shells, glass jars, marble, and oil lamps. Netivei Israel, the National Transportation Infrastructure Company, will preserve the site for public viewing.

In 2006, a housing project uncovered ancient ruins in Yucatan, Mexico. The National Institute of Anthropology stepped in when they were asked to.The remains of a Mayan ballgame court were discovered.The Mayan ballgame court was found under the construction site.

Fernando Acevedo and Donato Espana found the court was 2,500 years old and large, measuring 82 feet long and 15 feet wide. The court served a ballgame with major cultural importance in Mayan religion. This important heritage site avoided destruction.

In 2011, Vincent Marcello planned to build a new pool and hired archaeologist Ryan Gray to dig before construction started.

Gray found human remains, as everyone suspected. He uncovered 15 wooden coffins where the new pool was planned.These departed individuals were interred in the larger Saint Peter Cemetery of New Orleans.People did not find this surprising because bones and whole skeletons surfaced in the '80s during another building project nearby. Gray’s team sent all coffins and human remains, as found, to Louisiana State University for study and care.

During the Second World War, an unexploded RAF bomb was uncovered in Berlin.Allied bombing campaigns.These campaigns dropped 3.4 million tons of explosives. Some bombs, maybe 15 percent, did not explode. They simply vanished during post-war rebuilding. Now, many countries in Europe and Asia still find unexploded ordnance under buildings and public areas.

On Christmas Day 2016, in Augsburg, Bavaria, the Schwabian city,a four-thousand pound (two ton) RAF bomb from World War Two surfacedunder a construction site. This action forced 54,000 local residents to leave.

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced the discovery.The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities announced the discovery.construction workers drilling a new sewage drain in Kom Shakau village, Tama township, northern Sohag, Egypt, uncovered the 2,200-year-old temple of Pharaoh Ptolemy IV. He was the fourth pharaoh of Ptolemaic Egypt fromThe temple dates from 221 BC to 205 BC.he died then.

On October 2, 2019, Mostafa Waziri, the secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said construction stopped while archaeologists uncovered the temple ruins. The drilling team found limestone walls with writings, one bearing Ptolemy IV's name.

Construction workers in Buckingham, southern England, foundForty-two skeletons, possibly from the 11th or 17th century, were buried.They found these while preparing a new development on former farmland. The skeletons’ hands appeared tied behind their backs. Archaeologists guess they came from Anglo-Saxon Britain or the English Civil War, 1642 to 1651. They might even be prisoners executed on gallows, but the official report is secret. Local townspeople demand facts because the area has "historical significance."

TheMK Citizen., Places for People, the company owning the land and planning the development, had to order an archaeological look, which led to the discovery of the remains.

Experts at the National Museum of Scotland identified two large male sperm whale fin bones. Workers at a light rail construction site on the port of Leith in Edinburgh, Scotland, found these. According to theA Scotsman found whale bones under a light rail dig site in Edinburgh., the bones might be trophies from many whaling trips between 1616 and 1963. Researchers state the bones could be nearly 800 years old.

City of Edinburgh archaeologist John Lawson found whale bones under a light rail dig site in Edinburgh.John Lawson said this about the whale bones found under the light rail dig site in Edinburgh., "These bones give a rare look at and a physical tie to Leith's whaling past, a lesser-known maritime industry that reached the Antarctic in the 20th century."

The Trams construction site on Constitution Street yielded other interesting discoveries. These include a 1790 wall surrounding a graveyard, a historic graveyard, a cannonball, and the South Leith Parish Church wall.