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| One skull from the site, with a bullet wound [Source] |
Crews working on a road outside the Far Eastern Russian town of Vladivostok in the fall of 2009 were forced to halt construction when they discovered a mass grave in the path of the proposed road, totalling 495 skeletons (3.5 tons of bones). Most of the skulls have gunshot wounds, and bits of clothing and coins found in the grave have led volunteer archaeologists to believe that this is the result of Stalinist purges.
The site itself is no stranger to Stalin’s paranoia and executions due to largely false charges. There used to be a barracks for political prisoners several kilometres from the site, and a short distance away a memorial to Stalin’s victims already stands.
The company immediately halted construction on discovering the grave, a sort of find which has become less frequent since a surge of finds like these after the fall of the Soviet Union. A spokesperson said they would leave investigation of the site to the experts [source], and the battle to excavate and study the remains has been a long one, having to wait for the ground to thaw properly before a large number of the skeletons could be excavated.
Finds like this often serve as reminders of the near past, and bring the techniques archaeologists use into more recent memory—not to mention reminding us that there are likely still more of these mass burials out there, and that perhaps it is our duty as archaeologists to locate these graves, maybe finding out who these people were and reburying them elsewhere.
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