Skeletons yield clues about 19th-century immigrant life in New Haven

Yale student Sarah Brownlee and biological anthropologist Gary Aronsen, examine
Yale student Sarah Brownlee and biological anthropologist Gary Aronsen, examine the skeletons at the Yale Biological Anthropology Laboratories. (Photo credit: Stephanie Anestis Photography)
On July 12, 2011, a human bone was discovered jutting from a drainage trench at a construction site at Yale New Haven Hospital. The New Haven police and state coroner were called, but it was no crime scene. Michael Massella, a security officer on duty at the hospital, contacted his co-worker Anthony Griego, a retired New Haven police officer and local historian. Griego knew that the construction site - the hospital was expanding its emergency department - lay above a forgotten Roman Catholic cemetery. On his advice, then-State Archaeologist Nicholas Bellantoni was called to the scene. Bellantoni, in turn, called Gary Aronsen, a biological anthropologist at Yale University. The construction site temporarily became an archaeological dig.
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