Join the History Uncovered podcast for a look at the most fascinating history news stories and historical anniversaries from March 2024.
It’s the end of March 2024, and we’ve picked a few of our favorite history news stories from this month as well as a handful of significant anniversaries from decades past.
Over the past month, we’ve uncovered a number of exciting news stories, including the discovery of the upper half of a statue of Ramses II in Egypt almost a century after the bottom half was found, new evidence suggesting that a site in Ukraine is the oldest known human settlement in Europe, how archaeologists in China came across a well-preserved tomb from the Ming dynasty, the mystery behind a 500-year-old gold Jesus ring found in Sweden, as well as the surprise discovery of a mass grave in Nuremberg, which archaeologists believe belongs to Black death victims.
In Terra VeritasArcheologists believe that as many as 2,000 people were buried in the mass grave during a 17th-century wave of the plague.
Archaeologists came upon the mass grave while conducting a routine survey ahead of the construction of new retirement homes. Though they suspected that the site might contain artifacts from the Thirty Years’ War, archaeologists were astonished to discover hundreds of skeletons instead.
“No one expected there to be graves or even mass graves filled with hundreds of bodies,” Julian Decker, whose company In Terra Veritas conducted the excavations, told All That’s Interesting. “So the surprise was quite overwhelming when we figured out what was hidden there.”
Researchers initially hypothesized that the graves came from the World War II bombing of Nuremberg in 1943. But radiocarbon dating suggested that they were much older, and had been buried between the late 15th century and early 17th century. After some historical detective work, archaeologists concluded that they were victims of the Black Death who had died during an especially devastating wave of the plague between 1632 and 1633.
We also covered a number of historical anniversaries from March, including the death of John Candy on March 4, 1994, the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 on March 8, 2014, the birth of Harry Houdini on March 24, 1874, the first and last time that Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X ever met on March 26, 1964, the discovery of the Terracotta Army in China on March 29, 1974, and the opening of the Eiffel Tower in Paris on March 31, 1899.
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