Good thing shoppers didn’t know about this: Over 200 skeletons have been found in a mass grave located under a Paris supermarket. The management at the Monoprix supermarket wanted the basement cleared for redevelopment, but little did they know: “We expected it to have a few bones to the extent that it had been a cemetery, but not find mass graves,” says the store’s manager.
The market sits on the site of a medieval hospital that had its own cemetery, but most bodies were supposedly moved to the Paris Catacombs in the 1700s. Archaeologists found eight pits in all, the first seven housing five to 20 bodies each. The last contains more than 150 bodies, piled head to toe in two rows up to six bodies deep.
Archaeologists plan to conduct carbon dating and DNA analyses to see when and why those people died in the Hôpital de la Trinité, which was torn down in the 1700s.
