Author Archives: hsmagh

To Dig or Not to Dig

With such importance placed on rituals and disposal of the body, we think we have taken care of the body and given it a final resting place.  But what if someone was to come along and dig it up?  We would be outraged, demanding the return of the body and punishment for the perpetrator right?

Saxon Burial (Photo from Wessex Archaeology http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/8469631615/sizes/m/in/photostream/)

Saxon Burial (Photo from Wessex Archaeology http://www.flickr.com/photos/wessexarchaeology/8469631615/sizes/m/in/photostream/)

Well, this is exactly what archaeologists do when they encounter ancient burials.  They methodically remove the contents of the grave (including the body) and scientifically examine the remains.  An Anglo-Saxon sarcophagus, for instance, has just been opened for examination:

http://www.archaeology.org/news/1528-131118-england-lincoln-castle-sarcophagus

Is this ethical?  Usually, no one makes a fuss when it’s a pagan burial, such as one from Druid culture or ancient Greek culture, but what if it was a Christian burial?  Archaeologists will excavate relatively recent remains (in their viewpoint) from only a couple centuries ago.  A field school in Italy explicitly excavates in a churchyard cemetery:

http://www.fieldschoolpozzeveri.org/

How recent is too recent though?  When a body must be exhumed nowadays, it is very traumatic for the family and many people say that it is disrespectful to the deceased person.  Is excavating a grave the same thing? Is it okay since there is no living family or community connected with corpse?  An article from the Economist (http://www.economist.com/node/1056932) discusses how ethics come into play in burial archaeology.  When dealing with human remains, archaeologist must be respectful of how the cultures would want their remains to be handled and they often come into conflict with native people (such as the conflict with Native American tribes as mentioned in the article).

We must weigh the benefits against the damage that burial archaeology entails.  I think that what we learn by excavating these graves outweighs the damage that excavation causes.  We learn about the culture of the deceased person as well as general trends of how humans deal with death.  Just like exhuming a body for forensic analysis in a criminal case will be worth the emotional pain for the valuable evidence it provides.

Two Massacres and No Funeral

We’ve been talking about in class how central the funeral is to the mourning process.  The funeral takes care of the body and gives mourners closure.  So what happens when there is no funeral?

This is unfortunately usually the case in war or genocide.  The dead are piled into mass graves or sometimes just left where they were killed.  Throughout history, the innocent have been massacred and their bodies unceremoniously abandoned.  One example is the recent archaeological discovery of a 5th century massacre in Sweden.  The remains show that the individuals experienced violent deaths and were left where they fell, since the dead were usually cremated during this time period.  Read more here:

http://www.archaeology.org/news/1369-131007-sweden-sandby-borg-massacre

Viking Mass Grave http://www.montysworldonline.com/2010/05/viking-mass-grave-excavated.html

Viking Mass Grave
http://www.montysworldonline.com/2010/05/viking-mass-grave-excavated.html

This regrettably still happens all over the world.  It happened during the Holocaust, the genocide in Bosnia and Serbia, and in Liberia.  The massacre in Liberia took place at a refugee camp twenty years ago, with the victims dumped into an unmarked mass grave.  Action is only being taken now to bring the perpetrators to justice.

http://news.yahoo.com/liberia-massacre-neglected-mass-grave-161230540.html

The victims of these massacres are not cared for after death by their loved ones.  They did not get the ceremony they wanted or that their beliefs mandated.  Their loved ones did not get to say good-bye to their deceased.  What happened in these communities? How did they deal with their loss?  How did their community not break down in the absence of this most important rite of passage?

I think that when something this terrible happens, the community just has to reset and move on.  Since the violent situation often makes it impossible to loved ones to go back and claim the bodies of their deceased, people just have to accept it and move on.  This sounds rather harsh but I think that this is the community’s survival mechanism.  If they tried to go back and claim the bodies for a funeral, it would take a very long time or they could be killed themselves.  They have to come to terms with the fact that they won’t be able to care for the body as they wish and they must honor them in some other way.

The lack of a funeral tends to lend itself to the building of a memorial monument, such as the Tomb of the Unknowns in Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.  When individuals of a community can’t honor their own dead, the community honors them collectively, thus giving the mourners closure and the dead their respect.

Fear of the Rising of the Undead

Eating your way out of your grave sounds like something from an old kooky horror television show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer; in renaissance Venice, it was a terrifying reality.  According to folklore, a corpse-turned-vampire would chew its way through its funerary shroud and emerge from the grave as a fully-fledged “traditional” vampire.  The only way to defeat the vampire was to wedge a brick in the corpse’s mouth to prevent it from chewing.  This particular myth of the vampire was perpetuated by the plague in the 16th and 17th centuries.  Plague victims were buried in mass graves; when another person died, the grave was reopened to add their body and once opened, the gravediggers met with a very unfortunate surprise.  The corpses already inside the grave seemed to have already attempted to eat themselves out; the shroud covering the mouth had been worn through and stained very dark.  The terrified grave diggers would shove a brick into the “vampire’s” mouth to make it unable to chew and then re-bury it.  Had the shroud been stained by the draining blood that the vampires had drunk before being buried?

vamp

Skull of an “exorcised” vampire

Not really. This dark stain was caused by a fluid created from the decay of the gastrointestinal tract contents and lining that had then poured out through the nose and mouth.  The worn cloth was the result of putrid gases and moisture produced by the decaying corpse.  Even the gaping mouth is natural.  Everything that made the corpses “vampires” was really just the normal process of decomposition.

You can read more about the Venetian vampires here: http://archive.archaeology.org/online/features/halloween/plague.html

The superstition surrounding these particular vampires resulted from a misunderstanding of the process of decay.  In whatever time you live in, digging up a grave and exposing a bloated corpse with a black gaping chasm in place of its mouth would be terrifying, but at least now we have the medical knowledge to understand that the corpse has only undergone natural processes of decomposition.  Without our modern information though, how would you possibly explain this horrible discovery?

People had to come up with a reason of why this corpse was so terrifying.  Postmortem changes such as algor mortis (the cooling of the body) and rigor mortis (the temporary stiffening of the muscles) were known at this time but the corpse was usually interred in the ground while they were still in effect, especially if it was the body of a plague victim.  Naturally then, the corpse had to be alive to move.

The fear of these “vampires” embodies our fear of the corpse.  As a quasi-object, nothing is really definite about the corpse, except that it is dead.  So when a corpse comes back to life, our world turns on its head because now we don’t know anything for certain at all.  That death was apparently not permanent prompted thoughts of evil or Satanic involvement.  Since 16th century Italians were strongly Christian, the Devil’s interferences in the human world were real and terrifying.

Vampire folklore is not peculiar to 16th century Venice.  Other “vampire burials” have been discovered by archaeologists in places like Bulgaria, Poland, and even the Greek islands.  Many of the old cultures of Europe as well as around the world have their own version of the vampire.  They all also had their own ways of dealing with them.  Bulgaria, for instance, buried their vampires with iron stakes through their chests (read more here: http://archive.archaeology.org/1209/trenches/sozopol_bulgaria_black_sea_burial_skeletons.html). Did all of these cultures come up with the idea of a vampire based on the misunderstood decomposition of the corpse?  Or is it simply our imagination running away with the personification of our fear of death?