HUMAN remains as old as 1,000 years were unearthed at various sites at Hopwood Junior High School.
An archaeological team of the Historic Preservation Office expects to find more skeletal remains during the ongoing Verizon construction project on the campus.
Lon Bulgrin, an archaeologist, said the bone samples will be sent to a U.S. firm for analysis.
Bulgrin said the remains came from two different time periods. Some are believed to have been buried during the latte period which is about 500 or 1,000 years ago.
“We knew from the last few years that there were bones in Hopwood,” Bulgrin said.
John Castro Mames, an archaeological technician, said they accidentally found some of the remains when one of the diggers hit something on the ground.
The archaeological team has been monitoring the site for two weeks now.
Bulgrin said Hopwood’s location could be a village during the latte period. During those days, people bury their dead relatives under their houses or very close to them.
The archaeologist said that under the Historic Preservation Office guidelines, ancient human remains discovered in the CNMI have to be analyzed and documented.
Once this is done, the remains will be reburied close to the site where it was originally found.
“We then try to put some kind of a marker like a latte stone on their burial site. We had done this at DFS and at the Guma Hustisia,” Bulgrin said.
