The friary’s position on a street that survives in modern Leicester as Grey Friars Street gives the historical geography a literal survival in the city’s current street plan. The car park where Richard was found is immediately adjacent to that street, in a location that the medieval map research had correctly identified as consistent with the friary’s documented layout.
The archaeological work conducted since 2012 has extended the excavation beyond the area of the initial discovery. Subsequent seasons of excavation have explored more of the Greyfriars site, recovering additional information about the friary’s layout, the remains of its tiled floors and architectural elements, and other burials from the monastic period. None of these subsequent finds has complicated the identification of the skeleton found in 2012; if anything, the extended archaeological context has reinforced the placement of that burial within the friary’s choir.
The King Richard III Visitor Centre, which incorporates the excavation site, maintains the original grave location under a glass floor. Visitors walking over that floor are standing, separated by a few centimeters of reinforced glass, over the exact spot where the bones of a fifteenth-century king lay undisturbed for 527 years. The experience is difficult to describe in terms that don’t reach for the dramatic, but the physicality of the connection — real place, documented history, preserved site — is part of what the centre offers that text alone cannot.
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## What Haplogroup J Means
Richard III’s mitochondrial haplogroup J is one of several major haplogroups found among people of European ancestry. Understanding what a haplogroup designation tells us — and what it does not tell us — helps situate the DNA results in their proper scientific context.