A file photo of Medford City Hall in Medford, Massachusetts.
An examination of a former cemetery site next to City Hall in Medford, Massachusetts, uncovered "cultural artifacts" apparently left behind seven decades ago, the mayor said Thursday, ahead of a new redevelopment project.
Skeletal remains were found, a city spokesman confirmed to NBC10 Boston, noting that it's believed 10 gravesites were uncovered.
The search was done at the City Hall Municipal Lot this week, prompted by concerns from people on the Medford Historic Commission about the relocation of the old cemetery to make way for Interstate 93 in the 1950s, Mayor Breanna Lungo-Koehn said.
"The City will be working with the state and the Massachusetts Historical Commission to properly and meaningfully relocate the artifacts accordingly," she said in a statement.
The cemetery that stood in the spot from 1816 was relocated to Oak Grove Cemetery in 1950, but the historic commission members noted, as part of the city's Medford Square redevelopment process, that there were less stringent requirements for relocated cemeteries then than there are now, the mayor said.
That prompted a search of documents involved in the initial relocation, which led to this week's examination by an archaeological team. Lungo-Koehn didn't share more information about what was uncovered or the time frame of the artifacts' relocation.
As the city embarked on the redevelopment project, finding more bodies was always a possibility, as the city's request for project proposals, issued in September, noted. A section touches on the former Cross Street Cemetery site, noting that the city was hiring an archaeologist to examine the site and that, "Even with exhaustive efforts, there is always the chance of additional, unanticipated discoveries at this location."
