Developer sues nuns for failing to disclose location of historic burials

...in Iowa.

Obviously Hawaii isn't the only state of the union with ancient burial issues, and it's always interesting to see the present collide with the past in other people's backyards. Yesterday's NYTimes had this story in which a condominium development was halted indefinitely by the state archeologist when the property turned out to contain a large number of pre-Civil War burials.

The developer sued an order of nuns from which he had purchased the land for failure to disclose the remains. Meanwhile, the diocese which owned the land before the nuns says it believed all the burials had been cleared out long ago.

Iowa law requires property owners to pay for excavating a site for human remains, and [the developer] is seeking compensation for those costs, the relocation of the remains and the lost use of the site.
...
Attorney Glenn Johnson, who represents [the order], said the nuns did not know the site still contained human remains. As part of the land's transfer, he said, the diocese was supposed to move the remains to another cemetery.
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[The discovery of remains] led to an excavation by the state archaeologist's office. Shirley Shermer, director of the state archaeologist's burials program, said there were remains of at least 600 bodies at the site, mostly in unmarked graves.

''In these old, historic cemeteries, if it is closed and no longer used, some of the graves are moved,'' she said. ''Sometimes, if the local belief is all the graves have been moved, more than likely only some of them have been moved.''

She said her office is about three-quarters of the way through its analysis of the remains. But unless other documentation surfaces, such as a map identifying the graves, it's unlikely the remains will ever be identified, Shermer said.

The remains, mostly fragments, will be reburied in a common burial vault at Mount Olivet Cemetery.