2013:525 - New Square, Trinity College Dublin, Dublin

Trinity College Dublin is currently undergoing an upgrading of all major services including the construction of a new drainage system for the rugby playing fields. These works included the construction of small attenuation tanks in the basement of house Nos 38 and 40 in New Square East, a residential block in the college constructed in the early 1830s. These buildings do have small cellars roughly 2m square but these are very low in height, measuring only 2.7m and probably not designed to be actual habitable chambers.

The new tanks were to sit within these low limestone cellars and this required a reduction in the floor level between 0.5m and 0.6m in depth. Other related works include the widening and expansion of the cellar door opes and the insertion of concrete lintels over the heads of the opes. During the hand excavation within No. 40, a number of bones were noted within the rough clay floor and these were immediately identified as human remains, most likely to be related to anatomical studies carried out in the college as they included a part of a human cranium, which had been sawn through. Excavations in the cellar at No. 38 also produced bones, many of which were animal but with several human bones included amongst them. A total of eleven human bones were found including leg and arms bones, two of which had cut marks. In addition to this, one of the animal bones had a metal rivet in it which may suggest it was originally an anatomical sample skeleton, hung on wires.

The construction date of the 1830s for New Square suggests that these remains originated in the New Anatomy house, which replaced the original Anatomy House located at the eastern end of Fellow’s Square, which was opened in 1711. The New Anatomy House was constructed at the eastern end of college (in its present location) in 1825 when the Medical School was shifted to this end of the campus. These remains can be paralleled to other dumps found during archaeological excavations and investigations at Trinity College, at the Ussher Library (Excavations 1999, no. 231) and in the internal courtyard of the Medical School at the eastern end of college (Excavations 2002, 0586). The bodies may been obtained legally from the various lunatic asylums or the workhouse in James’s Street or even from donations from families, as this was allowed after the Anatomy Act of 1832 was passed, in and around the time when these bones were dumped. However, the roughly concealed nature of the burials, in the foundations of a building under construction at the time, may suggest that the bodies were obtained illegally as part of the ‘body-snatching’ trade, as this practice continued for some time after 1832 because of a severe lack of corpses. If indeed they do represent illegal corpses, they are mostly likely to have originated in either Bully’s Acre cemetery at Kilmainham, or Glasnevin where the historical documents record such thefts by students.

In Cellar No. 40 the find was predominantly animal bones but these were probably also from anatomical studies as animal dissection was also practiced extensively in the Anatomy House. As a result of the find, the excavation requirement within the cellar was reduced to avoid exposure of more bones and preserve the existing remains in situ. Several displaced bones, found loose in the upper levels, were reburied beneath the new floor level.

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