Paper short abstract:

Anthropological observations suggest the truly hapless died here: elderly, the disabled of any age, the very ill; and those desperate enough to commit crime yet unlucky enough to be caught. Their graves displaced by police, an associated plaque gives the wrong date for closure of their workhouse.

Paper long abstract:

The border wall that once outlined Tukthuset (c 1740-1939) still delineates the "othering" within Norway's 'Long Nineteenth Century', a time when police could round up vagrants and sentence them to the workhouse for 6 months, without trial. The physical remains from Oslo's workhouse (Tukthus) include skeletal remains (N=305), documents and reports. The cemetery was shifted with dubious care in 1989 to make room for a new police station; oral histories and reports from archaeologists claim the local indigent community witnessed the removal of graves, stating the removed dead were "people like us".

A partial footprint of Tukthuset's precinct, now stylized by a polished, granite insert in the police station's outer wall, crosses the new road that displaced the workhouse cemetery and passes through an expensive restaurant. This seems to commemorate the unknown, impoverished dead. And yet the very real border between the poor and the outer world, once a tall, wooden fence, is a caricature in pink stone, a monument to the bankers and city managers who built it in 2000, in which the accompanying plaque is etched with erroneous dates. Perhaps a well-meaning acknowledgement of the most impoverished victims of the Industrial Age, this memorial highlights that the now-erased graveyard, which once held the bones of those who died as inmates of Tukthuset, has been swept away by the occupational descendants of those who jailed them.