After discovering remains of up to 7000 patients from the state’s first mental institution buried on campus, The University of Mississippi is now facing the logistical challenge of what to do with them.

The exhumation of patients from the former Mississippi State Lunatic Asylum in Jackson is estimated to cost the university more than $US21 million ($A28.5 million): $US3000 to exhume and rebury each body.

It is a cost that University of Mississippi Medical Centre (UMMC) never envisaged when they set out to construct a new road to link the north and east areas of the campus in 2012.

Work was underway when construction equipment exposed 66 unmarked, wooden coffins.

At the time, UMMC said the coffins were less than two metres long but alarmingly narrow, “as if each held a pair of stilts instead of a human skeleton”.

But archaeologists said the weight of the soil had compressed the coffins over the decades.

Since then, further remains have been unearthed across the 20-acre stretch, with archaeologists estimating the remains belong to about 5000 to 7000 people.

So what was hoped to be a road project expected to be completed in a couple of months turned into a significant logistical and financial challenge for UMMC.

‘Bedlam’ at the Lunatic Asylum

Prior to the asylum’s operation, the state’s intellectually and developmentally disabled population were reportedly held in jails, dungeons or even chained in closets and attics.

Although the asylum provided a place where they could live and be cared for, the conditions were squalid and during the Civil War era, the asylum was heavily understaffed.

A superintendent who visited the Lunatic Asylum and later renamed it the Insane Hospital described the conditions as “verging on what the original Bedlam must have been like”.

In 1935, the state of Mississippi moved the asylum to the present location of the State Hospital at Whitfield and two decades later, the UMMC was built on the same site.

‘Respectfully preserving’ and studying remains

Since the discovery of the remains, the UMMC has tossed up ideas about how to best memorialise the remains.

In the meantime they have made use of the archaeological find, with graduate dentistry students and faculty studying the characteristics of the bones and analysing the dental remains.

Instead of the $US21 million exhumation and reburial process, the medical centre is floating a plan that would exhume the bodies at a cost of $US3.2 million ($A4.4 million) over eight years.

A 2014 survey of the old Mississippi Lunatic Asylum cemetery shows burial locations. Photo: UMMC

This plan includes creating a laboratory to study the remains and an on-campus, public memorial to “respectfully preserve” the remains next to an existing campus cemetery where people who donated their bodies for education and research are buried.

The university said such studies could reveal experiences and health conditions that ended in the institutionalised patients’ deaths at a time when huge stigma was associated with mental illnesses such as depression and schizophrenia.

Molly Zuckerman, an assistant professor in Mississippi State University’s Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures, said many of the country’s asylums dating back to the 19th and 20th centuries has been “lost to history or removed”.

“But human remains represent archives and sources of information about human health and disease, and life experiences in the past that cannot be gotten from any other source of information,” she said.

With the plans pitched at the preliminary level, the UMMC’s next task will be to win the approval of the university’s head and the college board and secure a financial backer in internal, state, federal and private sources.

-ABC