PHOTOS: Historic Human Remains

During routine construction to dig a driveway last week, contractors accidentally discovered a human skeleton buried about five feet below the foundation of a Georgetown home on the 3300 block of Q Street, NW.

Dr. David Hunt, a museum specialist in physical anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History, told Patch that the bones were "obviously historic in nature."

The mostly-deteriorated wooden coffin, the rust and corrosion on nails found near the body and the initial evaluation of the state of the bones, suggest the individual had been buried for possibly 150 years, he explained.

Though Hunt had not been able to perform a full biological profile on the bones to determine the full ancestry, he said his initial evaluation revealed the body of a 35 to 40-year-old male.

He will be examining the remains this week and working on the biological profile to help identify more information about this individual.

The images included in this piece were provided by Hunt as was much of the content of the captions.