Hard hat...

We meet some interesting folks on our way home on the train.

Standing near where we were seated was a young woman carrying a hard hat. When the person seated next to The Man vacated the seat hard hat lady sat down. I said to her, that’s not something you see a young lady with a hard hat. She laughed and told us she was working for crossrail as a geologist. Well that piques our curiosity and soon she was telling us about how she worked at the tunnel face checking that the cut face was safe and that tunnelling could continue.

I bet you see some interesting things The Man said to her, and she told us about the small fossilised shark teeth, but no dinosaur bones. She did say that they had come across some very early plague burials. They knew they were early because the skeletons were laying side by side. Later plague victim burials were nowhere near as  neatly position rather they were probably just tumbled into mass graves.

Archaeologists say 12 skeletons found beneath a building site in London could provide evidence of a Black Death burial ground.

The remains were found by teams working on Crossrail - a £15bn project to improve transport links in the capital, including at Farringdon where the bones were found.

Historical records indicate a hastily-built cemetery opened in the area in 1348 as the plague spread across the country.

Up to 50,000 people are thought to have been buried there in less than three years.

Jay Carver, lead Crossrail archaeologist, said: "This is a highly significant discovery and at the moment we are left with many questions that we hope to answer.

"We will be undertaking scientific tests on the skeletons over the coming months to establish their cause of death, whether they were plague victims from the 14th century or later London residents, how old they were and perhaps evidence of who they were.

"However at this early stage, the depth of burials, the pottery found with the skeletons and the way they have been set out, all point towards this being part of the 14th century emergency burial ground."

The skeletons were found during excavations below a road in Charterhouse Square.

They were buried in two rows and laid out in a similar formation to skeletons discovered at a Black Death burial site in Smithfield in the 1980s.

Experts at the Museum of London Archaeology will now use DNA testing and carbon dating to determine both a cause of death and a burial date.