200 bodies found in a dig under a church in the Netherlands

A group of Dutch archaeologists confirmed on Tuesday that they had located the remains of around 200 people underground during a excavations in a church in the city of Delft, in the east of the Netherlands, before the expansion of the royal burial chamber.

After several months of excavation, archaeologists have now reached a depth of 1.5 meters underground and they found “150 people buried in graves” as such, and the bones of four or five people together in several ossuaries, archaeologist Michael Bot confirmed on local radio. West broadcast.

The burial chamber of the Nieuwe Kerk in Delft also houses the remains of 43 members of the Dutch royal family dating from the time of William of Orange in the 16th century. “So now we have the bodies of about 200 people “who belonged to a high social class of the cityBot summary.

In the Middle Ages, De Markt, the place where the church in question is located, was a medieval cemetery intended for the poor inhabitants of the city, who were buried much closer to each other, in inexpensive coffins, their physical condition was notoriously bad, and they died much younger than their wealthy neighbors.

While, the interior of the temple housed the remains of the bourgeois families of Delft, buried more luxuriously, near the altar or the mausoleum, and whose bodies reflected that they had lived longer and in better health.

“We are discovering major differences between the medieval bones that we previously found at De Markt and the people we now find inside the church,” noted archaeologist Steven Jongma, who calls the finds “new. chapter in the history of the church “.

It was not a tradition to bury gifts and personal items inside the tomb with the dead, which made the investigation difficult for determine what time period all the people buried came from and who they were exactly, but over the years church officials have left information about the place and the people buried inside.

The bones found will go to the archaeological deposit of the municipality for DNA investigations and identification of the remains, then they will be reburied in a cemetery in Delft because there is not enough space in the catacombs of the church.

The excavations and investigations inside the church will continue throughout the month of September., and it is estimated that the work to expand the burial chamber will cost around four million euros, which is being paid for by the Dutch state itself.

(With information from EFE)

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