Our knowledge of late fifth-century Athens in general and of the plague of 430–426 bce in particular has largely, and at times exclusively, rested on the broad, cantankerous shoulders of the historian Thucydides. Indeed, Thucydides' own strong opinions on his native city, the possibility that he wrote some sections of his History well after their events, his very skill as a writer, and his proven capacity to shape his narrative creatively have sometimes led to the scholarly suspicion that he had at least embellished some of the more gripping parts of his discourse, including the section on the plague. However, during the 1990s, construction projects for the 2004 Olympics in Athens yielded numerous exciting discoveries involving Classical Athens; among them, in 1994 a burial pit at the ancient Kerameikos cemetery that can be dated, based on vases found in the site, to the early years of the Peloponnesian War. This, however, was no ordinary sepulcher, but is characterized by a neglect of traditional burial customs. The roughly 150 skeletons found there were interred in a plain pit composed in an irregular shape, with the bodies of the dead apparently having been laid out in a disorganized, random fashion. Further, no soil had been deposited between the layers of corpses. The bodies were found in outstretched positions, though a number had their heads pointed to the outside and their feet toward the center of the grave.