Dawson City crews unearth 4th body

Construction workers in Dawson City, Yukon, have discovered more human remains at a construction site where several corpses dating back to the Klondike Gold Rush have been found.

Yukon government archeologists were en route to Dawson City on Tuesday to supervise recovery of the latest set of remains, unearthed around 10 a.m. PT Monday.

The bones and other remains were found while workers were excavating at the site of the town's new sewage treatment plant. Workers immediately stopped digging and called the RCMP.

Historians believe the area was a secret burial ground for executed convicts at the height of the 1890s gold rush.

"We retrieved the items and the RCMP put them in a box," Pat Habiluk, project manager at the construction site, told CBC News.

"I got a shovel and dug into the side to expose a lime deposit, so that was kind of a telltale sign to us that there might be a coffin nearby."

It's the fourth corpse to be found at the site, near the historic North West Mounted Police detachment in Dawson City.

No coffin found

Three bodies and coffins were found at the site earlier this month. Those bodies are being kept in safe storage in the community.

But other than a lime deposit near the latest find, Habiluk said workers have not found any signs to date that the body was in a coffin.

"One thing we didn't find is a lot of wood fibre, which we found in the original site. So there's some speculation that there might not be a coffin there. It might just be a body in a hole," he said.

"That's why we decided, well, we're not even going to pick away with shovels, because that's beyond our expertise."

Yukon government archeologists had planned to start their investigative work on the initial three discoveries this week, but they have to retrieve the fourth body first.