Archaeologists piece together final moments of hundreds of Medieval Parisians

The skeletons of more than 200 medieval Parisians have been moved for further study to a warehouse of the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research in a suburb north of Paris, in order to unravel the mystery of their deaths.

A team from Inrap, as the institute is called, recently excavated the bodies after workers found them under the basement of a Monoprix supermarket in March. It is believed that the remains date from the 13th or 14th century AD.

“There are babies, there are young children, there are teenagers, there are adults, men, women, elderly people,” Isabelle Abadie, the lead archaeologist and anthropologist on the job, told The New York Times in an article of May 11, 2015.  “This was a mortality crisis, that much is clear.”