The decision by St John’s College, in the historic heart of Cambridge, to refurbish various properties just outside its main footprint prompted a series of small-scale excavations by the Cambridge Archaeological Unit, beginning in 2004. These proved illuminating, and in 2007 our work beside the 19th-century Old Divinity School (which stands opposite the college’s grand Tudor Great Gate) uncovered a large quantity of disarticulated human remains. Human bones had also been discovered at the time of the building’s construction, in 1877, and documentary evidence provided the explanation: the medieval Hospital of St John, which was suppressed in 1511 to create St John’s College, had maintained a cemetery in the area.
Redevelopment plans for the Old Divinity School included creating a basement within the structure, and while our initial evaluation in 2009 was small and relatively inconclusive, doing little more than confirming the presence of more human remains, in 2010 we returned for a full-scale excavation within the building (see CA 286). At first, the remains that we uncovered were structural rather than human – representing a series of buildings and features dating to the 19th century and earlier – but after a few weeks skeletons began to appear from the soil, and soon densely packed graves had been revealed across the whole area, arranged in multiple layers. It was clear that, once the entire cemetery space had been filled with burials, the hospital authorities had simply repeated the process, creating new, shallower graves on top of their predecessors. The burial ground had been filled at least six times between the early 13th and early 16th centuries, and from this relatively small space our investigations recovered 400 skeletons.
Following analysis, in 2015 an account of the human remains was published in the Archaeological Journal, and while we regarded the project proudly as a thorough and competent piece of developer-funded archaeology, there was a nagging feeling that the skeletons remained a rather anonymous, undifferentiated population, and that we had not properly got to grips with the question of who had been buried in the hospital cemetery. These individuals had almost all been buried in regular rows, following the same rite and without grave goods, in what felt like a rather uniform, depersonalised manner, and our report had treated them in a rather similar style.
