U.K. archaeologists have begun digging up some 3,000 skeletons dating back to the 1500s found buried underneath the location of a new railway station in London, CNN reported.
From now until September, a team of 60 archaeologists will work six days a week excavating the remains from the site known as the Bedlam burial ground, which was used during a time when catastrophic events were commonplace in London.
Some 20,000 people are thought to be buried there, including those who died in the English Civil War and the Great Fire of London in the mid-1600s.
Victims of the Great Plague of 1665 are also buried at Bedlam, a name derived from London's Hospital of St. Mary of Bethlehem for the mentally ill, according to CNN. Archaeologists hope to gain insight into London life at the time and learn more about the diseases that killed them.
"Specialists will look at the DNA of the disease that killed the person rather than their own DNA," Nick Elsden, project manager from the Museum of London Archaeology, told CNN.
Experts also hope to learn what caused an abrupt stop in plagues to hit the area after the one in 1665.
"There were 400 years of regular plague, and suddenly it stops," Jar Carver, the site's lead archaeologist, told the station.
"And what we want to be able to find out, from sampling the graves of that date, is why that is. And what it is about the bacteria that causes bubonic plague that suddenly changed at that point."
Bedlam burial ground, the first municipal burial ground in London, was used from 1569 until the early 1700s. Most of the Londoners there either could not afford a church burial or chose the location for political or religious purposes.
Following the excavation, the site will become London's new Liverpool Street Crossrail station.
The excavation comes on the heels of another mass grave with over 200 medieval skeletons recently discovered beneath a supermarket in Paris.
