At first glance, you might mistake the freshly dug hole on the State Capitol grounds in Raleigh for a shallow grave, especially so close to Halloween. But David Cranford, an assistant state archaeologist with the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources, assured passersby Tuesday it was nothing so ghoulish.
Cranford and a team from the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology were looking for any archaeological material under a small parcel of the capitol grounds prior to the installation of a new Revolutionary War monument.
“A few weeks ago, we came out here and conducted a ground-penetrating radar survey of this area because this portion of the grounds has had very little previous archaeological investigation,” Cranford explained. “The results indicated that there was an anomaly that we couldn’t explain.”
The original capitol building at Union Square was destroyed by fire in 1831. The state legislature approved construction of the Greek Revival design that opened in 1840. It serves today as the office for North Carolina’s governor and houses the state’s historic legislative chambers…