A bone to pick … up

Human remains just part of underground work

By Seth Jovaag

Sometimes they're in coffins.

Other times, they're scattered - a shin bone here, a femur or skull there. And rarely, very rarely, they turn up by the hundreds.

Whenever construction goes underground, there's a chance crews will find something unexpected. Usually the surprises are just broken glass, a hard-to-identify scrap of metal or, at most, a kitschy heirloom.

"We'll find old bottles or antiques maybe," said Scott Maly, vice president of United Sewer and Water Inc., Menomonee Falls. "Some people might call them artifacts, but usually it's just garbage."

On occasion, however, as crews dig down 10 feet, 15 feet or even 20 feet to run a sewer main or make room for a building foundation, they'll find a bone. And when that happens, things change.

"If a bone is found, they need to call an expert to determine if it is human or not," said Leslie Eisenberg, burial sites program coordinator for the Wisconsin Historical Society. "That's the first step - call us."

In May, MJ Construction Inc., Milwaukee, was digging a trench for a new water main at the corner of North 22nd Street and West Michigan Avenue when workers uncovered cranial elements and a femur.

Archaeologists were called in. Within weeks, a team of researchers uncovered the remains of at least eight people buried in 19th century coffins, their heads pointed to the west, which researchers said suggested a Christian burial.

The discovery drew media coverage and made the nightly news in Milwaukee. That's no surprise to Eisenberg.

After all, she said, this sort of thing is rare. Her office is the first point of contact when workers find bones, and she gets fewer than 10 calls a year. Many of those turn out to be about nothing more than animal bones.

Don Burda, who spent 37 years in Milwaukee's Department of Public Works before retiring a few years ago, said the May discovery was the first time he'd heard of human remains turning up at a Milwaukee work site. And to go even further back, Herb Goetsch, who started with the department in 1949 and retired in 1982 as commissioner of public works, said he, too, remembers nothing about coffins or bones.
"I don't recall anything like that coming up," he said.

Like the incident in May, bones found on construction sites tend to be many decades old and are usually never part of a criminal investigation, said Eisenberg. But by law - Wisconsin passed the Burial Sites Preservation Act in 1987 - workers still must report the find, either to the Wisconsin Historical Society's toll-free number, 800-342-7834, or to the police. And they must stop work near the remains.

After that, clearing up the case can be as simple as sending a digital photo. Eisenberg or someone on her staff can determine in seconds if the bones are human or, say, a cow's.

"That's very important, because most people aren't trained to know the difference," she said.

If the bones are human, archaeologists usually arrive that day or the next, and they can work side by side with contractors.

"If you can work 20 or 25 feet away, you can keep working, but we ask people to please stay away from the area," Eisenberg said. "It doesn't stop an entire project."

Of course, it can get more complicated. If the bones are from a catalogued burial site, more extensive research may be required. And if it's a total surprise - an uncatalogued American Indian burial mound, for example - the excavation could be long and painstaking.

"Then you have two options: modify your plans to avoid the area or apply to have the remains removed," Eisenberg said.

In 2005, construction crews twice found human remains during excavation for a $174 million expansion of St. Mary's Hospital in Madison. Archaeologists eventually uncovered and removed a wooden box full of bones, Eisenberg said.

It is guessed that the remains were left behind or forgotten when a 2-acre Catholic graveyard was moved in the 1860s or 1870s to another part of the city, she said.

That kind of thing happened a lot as larger cities grew in the late 1800s. In cities like Chicago and New York, thousands of graves were exhumed from inner-city graveyards, but often just the tombstones were carried out while the bodies remained. That left the bones for construction crews to find, sometimes a century or more later.

In the case of St. Mary's, the hospital went out of its way to handle the remains with respect, Eisenberg said. Work stopped entirely -- though delays lasted only a few hours -- and the remains were removed to a secure location.

They're to be re-interred soon at a cemetery on the city's west side, said hospital spokeswoman Sarah Carlson.

But St. Mary's decorum is not the rule. Fights over human remains can get ugly.

In Hawaii in 2004, Wal-Mart and a native tribe waged a prolonged court battle when the excavation for a new Sam's Club unearthed a tribal burial site. Similar disputes erupted in San Francisco and Texas.

One of the most famous, perhaps, was in Manhattan in 1991, when preconstruction of a massive federal office building on Broadway turned up a centuries-old, 6-acre cemetery with the remains of more than 400 Africans stacked in wooden boxes 16 feet to 28 feet deep.

That find stirred up a firestorm of criticism when the federal General Services Administration tried to continue building. Eventually, work stopped and the blueprints were changed to include a cemetery.
In February, President George Bush declared the grounds a national monument. Today, the African Burial Ground is a popular tourist destination.

One of the biggest finds in Wisconsin was at the Milwaukee County Grounds in Wauwatosa in 1991, when the expansion of Milwaukee County Hospital's ambulatory-care facility led to the discovery of 1,600 anonymous, unmarked graves, said William Hatcher, executive director of the Milwaukee Regional Medical Center. It turned out that the former nurses' residence was in the middle of a potter's field, a cemetery for those too poor to afford a private burial.

That find and others helped anthropologists determine that roughly 6,000 people were buried on the grounds between the late 1800s and 1974.

"It's one of those things where the old-timers always talked about it," Hatcher said. "But as the old generation moved out and the new one moved in, it became rumor and maybe myth.

"It was a real surprise."

More graves turned up on the grounds in 2000 when the Milwaukee Metropolitan Sewerage District was scouting sites for a huge detention pond designed to prevent flooding from the Menomonee River, said Leisel Gilmere, the MMSD's resident engineer for the detention pond project. Archaeologists and anthropologists were hired to figure out where, exactly, the boundaries of several paupers' cemeteries were.

Naturally, the MMSD wanted to avoid the graves. After all, excavating the 1991 site took archaeologists about a dozen years, and it wouldn't be possible for archaeologists to work around a detention pond that covers 65 acres.

"That's why we did the investigation," said Gilmere, who has an office on the grounds. "In this setting, there's always that kind of potential."

Now, the MMSD has to hope researchers did their job right. Work started in June on the detention pond. In all, the MMSD will remove 2 million cubic yards of soil to create the basin. That's a lot of digging in a place known to hold at least 6,000 graves.

Just last month, crews found bones twice in a week's time. Gilmere was called out to see them. She took pictures and sent them to Eisenberg for analysis. Both times, the findings were nothing more than soup bones.

"We hope we're home free," Gilmere said. "But we're sensitized to the possibility that we may find more."

Gilmere said that while she's aware she might find more bones, she doesn't fear the possibility. And she's not superstitious about her office being near so many graves.

"I certainly don't want to dig anyone up," she said. "But personally, I've never been one to worry about the fact that a cemetery is there."

Eisenberg said construction workers rarely comment on the "ick" factor of finding bones, either.

"I think the poltergeist hype is just that," she said.

In fact, she warns against an opposite reaction.

"No one should be taking home bones for their mantelpiece," she said. And if bones are taken from federal or tribal lands, that souvenir could land a person in jail, she pointed out.

Though it is quite rare that bone finds are attached to a crime, Eisenberg also counsels common sense to those who encounter human remains.

"If they see scraps of clothing or smell odor, or if they see some soft tissue, they should definitely step away, not touch the location and call the police or sheriff's department," she said.