SHREVEPORT – Renowned English archaeologist Dr. Richard Buckley received a phone call one day in 2011 from the Richard III Society.
The group wanted to find the remains of King Richard III, the English king who was killed in 1485 at the Battle of Bosworth Field, the last significant battle of the Wars of the Roses.
The king was reportedly buried in Grey Friars Priory, which was demolished in 1538.
Buckley said he was pessimistic that they’d ever find the remains of the last king of the Plantagenet dynasty, but he relayed the unlikely tale of the monarch’s discovery to a group of LSUS students on Friday.
“We were well aware that King Richard was buried in Leicester, but it was a surprise to get the call,” Buckley, who formed the University of Leicester Archaeological Services in 1995, said via Zoom. “I was rather pessimistic about the project from the beginning.
“I’ve worked on enough sites to know that if you go looking for something very specific, there’s a very good chance that you’ll be sorely disappointed. I was kept on board by the opportunity to learning more about the priory on the site than finding Richard III.”
Buckley and his team cobbled together maps that dated back to the 1600s and identified three likely locations where the old priory once stood.
Two locations were parking lots and the other was a former school playground.
Because of limited funding, the team had to carefully choose where to dig its exploratory trenches.
“It was like the American game of ‘Battleship,’” Buckley explained. “You had these plots, and you had to decide where you were going to dig.”
Ground radar couldn’t uncover a structure that would have been a friary. Complicating the effort was a maze of modern service lines – water, gas, fiber optics and sewer lines.
So Buckley decided to dig a series of exploratory trenches.
On the first day of the dig in the first trench (1.5 meters deep), a pair of leg bones were found.
Not unexpected since the crew was investigating a friary, where a cemetery would have been next to the building.
Historical accounts suggested that King Richard III was buried in the choir of the friary, and the bones suggested that the team was near the structure of the original friary.
After locating more structural elements of the medieval church and bringing in an expert in monastic design and architecture, “Trench 1” had actually located the choir of the friary.
And the pair of legs? After unearthing the entire body, battle wounds on the cranium and a peculiar S-shape curve in the spine were discovered, which had been attributed to the king in literature.
The body was in fact King Richard III, buried in a shallow grave that was too small and with no coffin.
Because of modern structures and roads, Buckley and his team knew they were extremely limited in the land area they could actually excavate.
“There was no chance that we were going to find a specific grave when we had no building plans of the friary or anything to go on,” Buckley said. “The skeleton told us that this was a male of 32-34 years old with evidence that he was killed in battle.
“Radio-carbon dating put the skeleton in the right time period. It was so unexpected.”
LSUS history professor Dr. Cheryl White, who brought students to meet Buckley at the site in England in 2018, arranged the Zoom lecture.
“I’m grateful that we have a relationship to where he’d take the time to speak to our students,” said White, who has hosted the renowned archaeologist in Shreveport on two different occasions. “It’s one thing to read about it in a book, but when you can engage with the actual person, you can’t beat that.”
History senior Lukas Harville thoroughly enjoyed the conversation with Buckley.
“It was very informative,” Harville said. “It’s an inspiration for anyone who wants to go into that field or in any area related to history.
“You never know what’s going to happen or what you’ll find. One day you could find nothing, and another day you can find a king.”
