Colonial Williamsburg announced that archaeologists have discovered the skeletal remains of four bodies while excavating a mass burial near the site of a Civil War hospital in Williamsburg.

The archaeologists also found the remains of three amputated legs that may have come from surgeries conducted at the hospital, according to the Wednesday announcement.

The remains are thought to belong to soldiers who fought in the Battle of Williamsburg in May 1862. They have been removed to the Institute for Historical Biology at William & Mary for analysis, Colonial Williamsburg said.

Archaeologists at Colonial Williamsburg first spotted the remains last year as they worked near the site’s historical Powder Magazine. They said the excavation was halted until the team this year received a permit to exhume the bones.

Jack Gary, the head of archaeology at the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation, has said the Williamsburg Baptist Church once stood nearby. The church, which was demolished in the mid-1900s, served as a hospital during and after the Battle of Williamsburg.

Gary said the four individuals appear to have been buried respectfully, with their hands folded over their stomachs and resting more or less side by side. There was evidence of trauma to their bodies, and bullets were found in the graves.

“All four of them appeared to have been laid in their graves,” Gary said. “They weren’t just haphazardly put in there.”

Buttons and suspender buckles were found in the grave, Gary said, but it has not yet been determined which side of the conflict the soldiers were on.

“Unfortunately, there were no uniforms or other items so far that we’ve been able to use to determine if they were Confederate or Union,” Gary said.

The limbs were found in a separate area close by and included one leg that had been amputated above the knee, he said. Amputated limbs were often buried with or near dead soldiers after a battle.

In all cases, there was evidence that the limbs had been sawed off. Two appeared to have been damaged, necessitating amputation. “It was very obvious,” Gary said.

The battle, on May 5, 1862, was fought southeast of town.

Afterward, almost every building in the community flew a yellow hospital flag, the historian Stephen W. Sears wrote.

Private John Wilson, of the Union’s 38th New York Infantry Regiment, wrote in his diary, according to the American Battlefield Trust: “the rebels left about 1000 sick and wounded in [Williamsburg. I] was all over the battlefield today and it was an awful looking sight at some places our men and the rebels laying side by side where they charged bayonets and killed each other.”

In an earlier interview, Gary noted: “There’s quite a bit of documentary evidence, right after the battle, about there being mass graves dug for the casualties that are happening in the Baptist church hospital.”

Further analysis will be conducted to try to determine the cause of death for the individuals found at the burial site and their affiliation, so they can be properly reburied.

The discovery was similar to a find on the battlefield at Manassas, Va., where the skeletons of two Union soldiers were found at a burial site, along with several amputated limbs.

That find was announced by the National Park Service in 2018. In that instance, one of the soldiers had a bullet still embedded in a bone in his leg. Archaeologists said that they knew the soldiers fought for the Union because the bullet was a type fired from a rifle commonly used by Confederates.

Those soldiers had been killed at the Second Battle of Bull Run in August 1862, roughly four months after the Battle of Williamsburg. They were buried in Arlington National Cemetery in 2018.