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Several bones were found after workers dug up tarmac in a historic Sussex city.
Police were called to the discovery of the apparently human remains during roadworks in St John’s Street, Chichester, at around 1.40pm on Tuesday.
A Sussex Police spokesman said: “The area has been cordoned off and tests are underway to confirm the nature of the bones.
“The discovery is currently being treated as unexplained and enquiries are ongoing.”
A box of grey-looking bones, including what appears to be a human pelvis, were retrieved from underneath the road in the city centre.
Police have cordoned off the street while officers carry out an investigation.
Chichester was a Roman and Anglo-Saxon settlement and a major market town through the Norman and medieval periods.
In 1994 some of the oldest human remains ever to be found in Britain were unearthed in a nearby quarry in Boxgrove, Sussex.
The bone was excavated by Dr Mark Roberts, a palaeolithic - Old Stone Age - specialist at the Institute of Archaeology, University College London, in an excavation funded by English Heritage.
That discovery was among the four oldest human bones unearthed in Europe at the time.
There are more than 3,000 palaeolithic sites in England but that was the first time any yielded human skeletal remains of this date.
