TAMPA, Fla. — Construction workers are unearthing history in downtown Tampa.

They may have found an old, lost cemetery at the Water Street Tampa development site across from Amelie Arena.

Strategic Property Partners, which is transforming the more-than-50 acre site into a mixed-use waterfront district, says archaeologists are now beginning the careful work of excavating what they are calling "grave shafts."

For their part, the archaeologists were not surprised when workers discovered what are most likely human graves. They knew this area of downtown Tampa was built on top of history, thanks to their work with The Tampa Bay History Center.

This entire area was once an 1800’s military outpost — Ft. Brooke.

“We had a pretty good inclination of roughly where and what should be found,” said Rodney Kite-Powell, Director of the Touchton Map Library and the Saunders Foundation Curator of History.

The Center holds maps that show the Estuary Cemetery. Its precise location may have just been found.

Not the first find

This isn’t the first time construction workers have made this kind of discovery in the area.

Crews found a cemetery while building the nearby Ft. Brooke parking garage in 1980.

More recently, as part of the "Replacing Ft. Brooke” Exhibition, Kite-Powell used modern maps laid over Ft. Brooke-era maps to give context to these discoveries.

If in fact archaeologists discover there are human remains, they could potentially be interred at Oaklawn Cemetery just off downtown. It’s where the non-native remains from the Ft. Brooke parking garage were also laid to rest.

The native remains discovered in the 1980 build were given to the Seminole Indian Tribe of Florida.

Strategic Property Partners said they do not anticipate a slowdown in development as archaeologists do their work at the site.