It started as a routine public archeology dig this summer, with more than 100 people, including Rowan University students, working an area immediately adjacent to the Red Bank Battlefield in New Jersey, just south of Philadelphia.
Then they found a human femur — and everything stopped.
When professionals took over, an extraordinary discovery ensued: the remains of 13 people, believed to have been Hessian soldiers, who were hired by the British to fight in the American Revolutionary War nearly two and a half centuries ago. They were discovered in a four-and-a-half-foot deep trench system that surrounded the battlefield’s Fort Mercer, university officials said.
