Kings, knights and parking lots

When people see something for the first time, they think it could be a fluke. But when it happens twice in quick succession, the smart money begins to see a pattern.

It was just last month that British archeologists dug through a parking lot in the City of Leceister and unearthed the body—genetically tested to make certain—of Richard III, the last Plantagenet King of England, who died in the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. Very few kings or queens of England have since met their death by such means.

And, then, just a few days ago, the skeleton of a medieval knight was found under a parking lot at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. The discovery is believed to date back to the 13th century and to be at the location of a monastery that was destroyed in the protestant reformation in 1558.

Archeologists are in a tizzy. Suddenly, they are toiling in a glamorous profession and can shed their image as nerds with pith helmets, trowels and bits of string stuck between tent pegs. For them, dating will no longer be just a rendezvous with the carbon machine.

And, needless to say, municipal officials in Leceister and Edinburgh are not exactly hanging their heads with dismay. They recognize the potential tourist bonanza.

So the smart money, seeing the pattern, has begun to focus on the obvious next step: parking lots, everywhere. All it takes is one celebrity burial to be unearthed, and you become an instant world heritage tourist site. As a local parking lot excavation enthusiast put it to me: “just imagine what would happen if you found someone famous buried in the parking lot in Picton behind the old Stedmans store: pandemonium would break out. And look at the inner pattern: first the 15th Century, then the 13th Century. I’ll wager someone’s sitting on an 11th Century gold mine. And if we don’t dig it, we don’t get the glory.”

The Canadian Association of Parking Lot Owners and Operators confirms a number of its members have been doing feverish caculations of the cost advantages of licensing their lots for archeological exploration instead of parking. So, too, have local municipalities that own lots.

County officials whom we contacted were skeptical about the whole phenomenon. “The chances that anything lying under one of our parkinglots will go back to the 11th Century is prettty remote,” said our source. “If there’s anything there behind Stedmans—and it’s a big if—because, remember, we have another parking lot overlooking the Glenwood Cemetery—it’s much more likely to be a 20th Century figure like Amelia Earhart, Glen Miller or Jimmy Hoffa.”

Still, she acknowledged, the Leicester and Edinburgh finds offer the municipality some real hope. “Just think what would happen if we came across the body of the Duke of Earl,” she mused: “we could have conventions here that would leave those Star Trek gatherings in Vulcan, Alberta, eating our dust.” The upside potential requries attention, she acknowledges—perhaps even a strategic plan. From a budget standpoint, however, she noted that any archeological protection strategy would force the county to make tough choices: would it be fixing potholes on Rednersville Road or taking a chance on being able to host hordes of doowop fans for the next hundred years?

The province of Ontario is also putting its finger up to the wind. Officials theorize that the wholescale excavation of parking lots could force more cars off the road and onto public transit and at the same time provide employment for a crack team of Ministry of the Environment bald eagle protection specialists who appear to be underemployed for the foreseeable future.

Parking lot archeology is also buzzing around the nation’s capital. The Harper government is said to be drawing up a plan that will see priority excavation sites pinpointed in a few key Tory ridings that have yet to receive funding from the G-8 or G-20 summit conference budgets. Opposition leader Thomas Mulcair has called for a massive make work program to excavate parking lots across the country, and to divert construction equipment away from the carbon-heavy oil sands in order to do so; although he stresses he is not against oil sands development as such. And Liberal leadership candidate Justin Trudeau has called upon the process of lot excavation to be “inclusive.”

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here. A spokesperson for the Centre for Meaningful Statistics in Athens, Georgia, noted that experts are still at a loss to say why missing celebrities would choose to be buried under future parking lots. And he rates the chances of finding someone important underneath a parking lot is about as high as finding a missing sock after it gets separated from its partner in the laundry. That bad, huh? Maybe Rednersville Road will get some potholes fixed after all. If he is buried here, the Duke of Earl’s not going anywhere in the meantime.

David Simmonds’s writing is also available at www.grubstreet.ca.