On December 23, 1950, while making his Christmas radio broadcast to the world, Pope Pius XII announced that Saint Peter's tomb had been discovered. Archaeologists had been searching for ten years in a place under the basilica that had been covered up for about a thousand years. They had found part of a small building dating from soon after St. Peter's death, and some bones, but no-one could be sure if they were the bones of St. Peter.