Digging deeper

After rummaging around a Leicester car park, a group of British academics has confirmed that the scoliosis-racked skeleton they found last summer is that of Richard III, the last of the Yorkist kings. Only two years into his reign, the 32-year-old medieval ruler was defeated and killed during the Battle of Bosworth in 1485, which ended the Wars of the Roses, with the Plantagenet dynasty replaced by the Tudors. “In the pantheon of famous finds involving monarchs, emperors and pharaohs it’s up there in the top five discoveries,” writes the Financial Times. 

As a proud Anglophile and an avowed Bones fan, I couldn’t help but vomit rainbows. Imagine: a DNA sample taken from a Canadian furniture maker, a 17th-generation descendant of one of Richard’s sisters, was all it took to end a centuries-old mystery of where his 500-year-old remains were buried. As Bones’ Dr. Temperance Brennan said, “You can always count on the dead.”

Volunteer archaeologist

Again, I find this all truly fascinating because as a child, I once dug up bones in our backyard. I thought, as overly imaginative eight-year-olds tend to do, that they belonged to a prehistoric creature — a Mesohippus, going by my dinosaur book — only to be told by a veterinarian that what I had stumbled upon was the skull of a dog, one that most likely passed away in the 20th century. So much for that. 

But even as a college sophomore, I continued dreaming of working alongside historians as a volunteer archaeologist in France, doing archival research and architectural restoration. The options I found online, however, clashed horribly with my schedule, which meant that I would’ve had to take a semester off to spend time — and money ‘ on a program for which I was not going to receive any university credit.

The closest I ever got to living out this fantasy was at Frieze Art Fair in 2010. At the London exhibition, I encountered “Frozen,” an installation based on the fictive premise that an ancient lost city, a hub of art and commerce, had been discovered beneath the site at Regent’s Park. The site-specific work was by Simon Fujiwara, a British/Japanese artist based in Berlin and Mexico City.  

Cultural moment

As the losing king, Richard III was given a low-key, inglorious burial in a Franciscan friary. There were also reports that his remains were thrown into the nearby River Soar after the dissolution of the monasteries in the 1530s. A dispute looms over which city should serve as his final resting place — Westminster Abbey in London and York Minster, where the monarch had planned to be buried, being the candidates — since this would no doubt attract tourists.

The New Yorker notes that the king found in a car park is having his cultural moment. “Kevin Spacey is deep in the Richard III vein right now, having spent much of last year playing Richard in modern dress at the Old Vic, in London, and at BAM, in Brooklyn, among other performance spaces around the world.” The actor is also in the Netflix original series House of Cards, which “owes much of its style and tone to the great power plays of Shakespeare — a good dose of Richard III spiced with a dash of Macbeth.

“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” Perhaps now is the time to re-examine one of history’s most ill-favored characters, immortalized by Shakespeare as “the troubler of the poor world’s peace.” Researchers say Richard III may not have been such a bad guy after all. 

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