of architectural stones, pottery fragments,
and tubes of sediment flank narrow aisles.
Thanks to the glut of construction-backed
excavations, spaces like these see a constant
flow of goods demanding attention.
In a small office near the maze, a re-
searcher holds a human skull. Alba Moyano
Alcántara is a “processor,” using a paint-
brush to dab away soil on the centuries-old
cranium. Like a triage nurse, she’ll decide the
next steps for these remains and other arti-
facts. Damp bones will dry slowly on racks in
a warm room down the hall; pieces of metal
get X-rayed to reveal their original forms.
Eventually, they’ll head upstairs, where
MOLA’s specialists catalog the minute details
of the finds. In an open-plan office, senior os-
teologists Niamh Carty and Elizabeth Knox
inspect a pair of incomplete skeletons. Carty
studies the top half of a young woman; Knox,
the bottom half of a man. Truncated bodies
are common in old boneyards, where new
graves often cut into old ones. Confiden-
tiality agreements with clients keep the
researchers mum on the exact origin of the
remains, but they offer that these are from
a “post-medieval cemetery.” If it wasn’t
St. James’s, it was a place like it.
The thousands of skeletons that pass
through MOLA contribute to a database of
London’s population-wide rates of pathology,
injuries, and other bioarchaeological infor-
mation from prehistory to the Victorian era.
“Every skeleton we look at is adding to the
bigger picture,” Carty says.
She lingers over a rotted-out tooth, which
likely caused a painful abscess before this
young woman died. Knox’s skeleton’s lower
legs have an irregular curvature, perhaps
a sign that he suffered from rickets in his
youth; his spine has Schmorl’s nodes, little
indentations on the vertebrae created by
age or manual labor. “Archaeologists proba-
bly all have them,” Knox quips.
Sometimes a small sample can shed light
on nationwide phenomena. The Crossrail
dig uncovered a burial pit from the 17th-
century Great Plague of London, which
killed nearly one-quarter of the population.
In teeth from that site, researchers discov-
ered the DNA of the bacteria that caused
the outbreak. Analysis of all the HS2 re-
mains might one day reveal migration and
disease patterns from the Middle Ages to
the Industrial Revolution.
MOLA employees also gain insight from
meaningless” by the site’s lead archaeologist.
After MOLA reexcavated in 2014 on behalf
of Bloomberg, the developers had another
shot to tell the temple’s story. Now visitors
descend several flights of stairs into a dark-
ened room. Light and mist create the illusion
of complete walls extending from the stubby
foundations of the subterranean temple.
Footsteps and ominous Latin chanting piped
in from the speakers crescendo, transforming
this ruin into the site of secret cult rituals.
To be sure, many builders see archaeology
as a compulsory, time-consuming, and ex-
pensive hurdle. There’s little publicly
available information on the costs for these
investigations, even for HS2, but according to
the research of Bournemouth archaeologist
Darvill, digging might add an extra several
million dollars, depending on the scope of
the plans. Still, the flashy new Mithraeum is
evidence that some have found a symbiosis
in using the past to try to make their proj-
ects more palatable to locals. Across the
city in Shoreditch, a once-gritty East Lon-
don neighborhood now synonymous with
gentrification, the remains of a 16th-century
Shakespearean playhouse called the Curtain
Theatre will be incorporated into a new
multipurpose development. According to
the ad copy, the Stage will be an “iconic new
showcase for luxury living,” and the “first
World Heritage Site in East London.”
The archaeology story of HS2 will be
too sprawling to fit neatly in a basement or
lobby. It will take years to process and ana-
lyze all its finds. As of fall 2019, only the two
biggest digs had finished: St. James’s and
the excavation of another 6,500 graves from
an Industrial Revolution-era cemetery at
the Birmingham station.
HS2 archaeologists are now running test
trenches to decide precisely which spots
they’ll uncover in between. “Some of them
are once- in- a- generation archaeological sites,
and some are smaller, still interesting, but not
large scale,” says project field lead Court. We
already know that HS2 will cut through a mys-
terious prehistoric earthwork called Grim’s
Ditch in the hills outside London, and farther
north, a Roman town and a millennia-old de-
molished church. Researchers also hope to
find traces from the Battle of Edgecote Moor,
which broke out in Northamptonshire in 1469
during the Wars of the Roses.
The fate of HS2’s archaeological ambitions,
however, is entangledindividual artifacts. Across the office,
Owen Humphreys and Michael Marshall—
so-called finds specialists—study uncommon
relics weeded out from the pottery pieces,
nails, animal bones, and other abundant ob-
jects destined for bulk inventorying. “I once
likened our job to being the seagull in The
Little Mermaid,” Humphreys says. “People
bring us things, and we take a wild stab in
the dark as to what they are—”
“—a very well-informed stab,” Marshall
adds. He holds the wooden leg of a Roman
couch found on the Thames waterfront, its
paint still red nearly 2,000 years later. “You
very rarely get things like this in Britain,”
he says. “It’s lucky that we got an oppor-
tunity to find out a bit more about what
people’s homes looked like.”
These inspections can help determine the
objects’ fates. The Museum of London houses
the world’s largest archaeological archive of
more than 7 million items from more than
8,000 excavations awaiting further study,
placement in a collection, or, in the case of the
St. James’s bones, reburial. A precious few
finds will earn spots on public display.Leather shoes, wooden combs, an
amber carving of a gladiator’s helmet, and
some 600 other Roman artifacts adorn
the ground floor of Bloomberg LP’s new
European headquarters in central London.
The nine-story structure sits on the site of a
3rd-century Roman temple dedicated to the
god Mithras. First discovered during con-
struction of an office building in the 1950s,
the Mithraeum suffered an infamously
botched reconstruction deemed “virtually (CONTINUED ON P. 118)BIGGEST. DIG. EVER.PopSci.com / Spring 2020 / PG 93