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Man finds human skull in front yard |
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Written by Noah Haglund, The Post and Courier
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With Halloween just around the corner, a James Island man made a startling discovery in his front yard: a human skull.
The Riverland Terrace resident walked to his mailbox around daybreak Wednesday and saw an object on the ground, authorities and the man's wife said. He didn't know what it was until he took a closer look.
"It's an uncomfortable feeling," said Christine Elliott, whose husband, Greg, spotted the cranium outside their Wappoo Drive home. "Disturbing a dead person is just something you don't do. ... I find it abhorrent, personally."
The Charleston County Sheriff's and Coroner's offices were investigating. They know the skull is old, but won't know just how old without further examination.
"It is not recent, I can tell you that for certain," Deputy Coroner Dottie Lindsay said.
Human remains often surface at Lowcountry construction sites. Last
fall, Mount Pleasant town workers found the bones of an unidentified
woman along with coffin fragments several feet below an Old Village
street while digging a trench for a drainage project.
Construction workers have uncovered numerous bones from forgotten
graveyards on the west side of the Charleston peninsula, where
cemeteries abounded between the early 1800s and early 1900s.
Outside the city such finds are not as common, but they do occur, said
Eric Poplin, a senior archeologist and vice president of Brockington
Associates, a Mount Pleasant-based consulting firm.
Poplin said there are some family cemeteries in Riverland Terrace,
though nothing obvious in the immediate area of the home. He found the
location odd.
"That's strange. In my experience, they're not just popping up," he said.
Fort Pemberton, a Civil-War-era bastion, is down the street, and construction crews have been building homes nearby.
To determine the age of bones from archeological sites, experts usually
rely on context, Poplin said. This includes tombstones, coffins,
buttons from clothing and other artifacts.
Bone deteriorates over time, giving some clues to the relative age, he
said. Carbon dating, a scientific technique that can yield an age
within about 50 years, is effective only for bones between about 300
and 50,000 years old and would not likely be used in this case, he said.
If anybody finds an old unmarked grave site, Poplin said they should
contact authorities. "By state law, all these things are burials, and
it's desecration to knowingly disturb them."
Reach Noah Haglund at 937-5550 or nhaglund@postand courier.com
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