Eureka: bones found at Duffy’s cut

“We’ve got skulls and we have bones. It’s incredible,” Dr. Bill Watson of Immaculata University told the Echo.
Watson and his team uncovered the bones Friday, March 20 at the site of what Watson believes is the final resting place of 57 Irish railroad workers who died there in 1832.
Watson said that the human bones had been uncovered as a result of using ground penetrating radar on the site which adjoins a Philadelphia commuter rail line.
“It’s the tip of the iceberg,” he said.
Among the discoveries are two partial skulls and a jawbone with six teeth.
“We have about ninety bones and none fragments so far,” said Watson.
Since the summer of 2004, excavation work at the site has been carried out by a team led by Dr. Watson.
Watson, whose faith in the work and his goal has never wavered, this despite the necessary slow pace of excavation, is hoping to discover whether the workers died of cholera, or in some cases, from deliberate negligence or violence from local vigilante groups.
Work at Duffy’s Cut has already uncovered a treasure trove of artifacts including a belt buckle, coins, eating utensils, buttons, pickaxes and various kinds of spikes and nails. A portion of rail track was even found during an earlier phase of the dig.
But the discovery of human remains has elevated the work to an entirely new level.
Duffy’s Cut covers roughly an acre. The exact whereabouts of the remains of the Irish workers within the boundaries of the site, or just beyond its borders, has been a mystery for more than a century and a half.
Watson believes that some of the Irish workers at Duffy’s Cut might have been buried alive during the stage of cholera known as cold cholera. At this point in the disease’s lethal progress, it is possible to appear dead, though the individual is still alive.
The discovery of the bones will now enable work to proceed in an effort to identify causes of death, and even to determine the identity of individuals.
Separate to the excavation at Duffy’s Cut, Watson and his team have been working to trace the arrival of the rail workers through shipping records for the port of Philadelphia. The team has uncovered records for the arrivals of eight ships in Philadelphia at the time, all carrying immigrants from Ireland. Most of them were natives of counties Tyrone, Donegal and Derry.