Beneath the everyday bustle of one of Ghent’s busiest market squares, archaeologists have identified a medieval burial ground that may hold as many as 240 skeletons stacked in layers several metres deep. The discovery came not from a planned excavation but from routine renovation work, when a small test pit dug to check the ground before planting a tree turned up human remains far older than anyone working on the project expected.
A two-square-metre test pit that changed the plan
The city of Ghent had been renovating the Vlasmarkt, replacing its traditional cobblestones with tarmac and adding new street furniture, including a tree at one corner of the square. Before planting could begin, the archaeology firm BAAC Vlaanderen dug a modest test pit, about two square metres, to check what lay beneath the surface at that specific spot. At a depth of roughly 1.3 metres, the crew found four well-preserved human burials. That result was enough to halt the tree-planting plan and prompt a wider assessment of the square.
Extrapolating from 20 burials to as many as 240
Based on the density of burials found in that small test area, archaeologists estimate roughly 20 people were interred within the original two-square-metre patch alone, according to a report from Archaeology News Online Magazine. Scaling that density across the full 23-square-metre area now understood to be part of the same burial ground produced an estimate of more than 240 skeletons in total. That figure is not a body count from direct excavation of every burial, but a statistical projection based on the sample already recovered, and it could shift if further testing changes the density estimate.
A separate borehole survey added another dimension to the picture, showing that burials at the site are not confined to a single layer. Instead, the evidence points to roughly five distinct burial levels stacked on top of one another beneath the square, a pattern consistent with a cemetery that stayed in continuous use for a very long stretch of time, with each generation’s dead layered above the last as available ground filled in.
A churchyard that outlasted centuries of change
Historical records already indicated that the area around the former St. James’s Church served as a burial ground, and the new excavation confirms that use stretched from roughly the 11th century through the 18th century. A cemetery active across seven centuries would have absorbed dramatic shifts in the city around it, including changes in population, disease, and urban development, all of which likely contributed to the layered structure now visible in the borehole data. Burial practices, plot reuse and the sheer volume of deaths over that span all point toward a churchyard that was worked and reworked many times before it was eventually built over and paved.
Why the city has chosen to leave the remains undisturbed
Rather than proceeding with a full excavation, Ghent’s authorities have decided to leave the burial ground in place. The tree originally planned for that corner of the Vlasmarkt will not be planted there, and no further excavation is currently scheduled at the site. Leaving a burial ground undisturbed, rather than clearing it for construction, is a common approach in European cities where medieval cemeteries frequently underlie modern public space, since full excavation is costly, slow and not always necessary if the site can simply be left alone beneath a resurfaced square.
That decision also reflects a practical reality: an urban market square in continuous daily use is a difficult place to run a lengthy excavation, and the burials themselves are, for now, adequately protected simply by staying buried under the new surface rather than being disturbed further.
What a fuller excavation could still reveal
Even though Ghent has opted against further digging at the Vlasmarkt for now, the burials that were recovered from the initial test pit remain available for study. Skeletal remains from a cemetery this long-lived can carry evidence of diet, disease, injury and general health across different periods of a city’s history, information that is difficult or impossible to reconstruct from documents alone. Bioarchaeologists working with material already excavated may be able to compare burials from different depths, and by extension different centuries, to trace how living conditions in Ghent shifted between the 11th and 18th centuries.
Because the wider cemetery is being left in the ground rather than cleared, any future excavation would likely be triggered by a separate construction project rather than a dedicated research dig, meaning much of what lies beneath the Vlasmarkt could remain unexamined for years, or decades, to come.
What the find adds to Ghent’s medieval history
Ghent has one of the best-documented medieval urban cores in Belgium, but discoveries like this one still reveal details that written records alone cannot capture, including the physical scale and density of burial practices tied to a specific parish church. Even without a full excavation, the confirmed presence of a large, multi-level cemetery under the Vlasmarkt adds a concrete data point to how densely the city’s medieval population used its available burial ground, and how much of that history remains preserved, quite literally, just beneath the pavement shoppers walk over every day.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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