Archaeology of the Undead

The many precautions people have taken to keep corpses in their graves

A sickle across the neck means no haunting the night for this Polish
skeleton.Gregoricka et al / PloS ONE

JAMES CLOSE

MAY 18, 2016

SCIENCE

Twenty-seven thousand years ago, in a stone-age village fenced in by

mammoth bones, three young people were buried together, their bodies
covered by burnt spruce logs and branches. A woman, disfigured perhaps by
some congenital abnormality, was placed in the middle. To her left, a man was
laid prone, his face in the dirt. To her right, another man had his hands angled
awkwardly onto her groin, where red ochre, a pigment with ceremonial
significance, was sprinkled. A thick wooden pole was driven through this
mans own groin and thigh, pinning him to the ground.

For archaeologists, including the researchers who exhumed this trio in the
1980s at Doln Vstonice, a prominent excavation site in the Czech Republic,
such burials are like prehistoric murder-mystery puzzles. The trios
internment is one of the oldest examples of a deviant buriala term in
archaeology for graves that are atypical, unexpected, or just downright weird.
Is the prone mans position a mark of disrespect? Did the womans
disfigurement change the way she was treated? And is the other mans
staking evidence (as some have suggested) of an ancient fear of the
dangerous deadthe belief that corpses would rise from their graves to
cause mayhem?

Historically, archaeology hasnt paid much attention to deviant burials, which

tend to involve peasants and criminals and are often discovered in excavations
where time and resources are limited, precluding detailed analysis. But over
the last few years, thanks to a broadening focus beyond the lavish mortuary
practices of the elite, the field has begun to take a much keener interest.
Researches have been systematically collating the phenomenon, revealing that
these deviant burials werent just some fringe practice, but surprisingly
widespread across cultures. A whole array of gruesome techniques now have
been reported, all with the apparent intention of keeping the dead firmly in
their graves.
The remains of the vampire of Venice who was buried with a brick in her
mouth, in order to allegedly prevent her from consuming plague victims. (Ho
New / Reuters)

In Eastern Europe, for instancewhere Bram Stoker drew inspiration

for Draculathere have been numerous discoveries of corpses that have been
staked. Bulgaria has had multiple cases of 700-year-old skeletons with
ploughsharesthe hefty blade of a ploughthrust through them into the
ground. Recent Polish excavations unearthed skeletons with sickles placed
around their waists or the necks. Other techniquessuch as stoning
(weighing the corpse down with heavy objects)have been found all over the
world, from 4,000-year-old Bronze Age burials pinned down with huge rocks,
to graves from Ancient Greece weighted down with amphora fragments, to
medieval English skeletons buried under grinding stones. The approach of
ramming something firmly in a corpses open jaw has been observed both in
8th-century Irish zombie burials and the grave of the Vampire of Venice, a
16th-century skeleton disinterred from a plague cemetery with a large sized
brick wedged between the teeth.
Burying people face down means they will
only dig themselves deeper if they re-
animate.
Abundant media coverage has followed these discoveries, which has fueled
public fascination, but often frustrated archaeologists, because many of the
stories are based on unpublished findings that have yet to be thoroughly
scrutinized. When further Polish excavations found decapitated skeletons with
skulls placed neatly between the feet, for instance, tabloids screamed vampire
burials. But the local Polish press pointed out that there were medieval
gallows nearby, which suggested that the bodies simply were executed
prisoners. Some scientists worry that media biases could be influencing
archaeology itself. Simona Minozzia paleopathologist at the University of
Pisaargued that the media hype surrounding the Vampire of Venice was
backed up by only a single publication that lacked adequate scientific
evidence. It cannot be excluded that the brick slid accidentally into the
mouth, she wrote.

To actually get to the bottom of these strange practices and resist

misdirection, archaeologists have begun to develop new systematic
approaches by collating deviant burials into datasets. The most
comprehensive analysis was performed by Andrew Reynolds, a medieval
archaeologist at University College Londons Institute of Archaeology, for
a book he published in 2009. He tracked down obscure references from the
musty basements of university libraries, eventually compiling practically every
known burial from Anglo-Saxon Britain: a staggering 25,000 burials.
Reynolds plugged the data into a vast spreadsheet, which allowed him to
organize the information into categories like position of decapitated heads
(most commonly missing).

Thanks to this approach, Reynolds was able to draw broad inferences into
deviant burials in Britain that up until his project could only have been
guessed at. The most common deviant burial type, for instance, was a prone
burial, which Reynolds says in fact was a superstitious measure to prevent
the corpse returning to haunt the living. (Burying people face down means
they will only dig themselves deeper if they reanimate, he points out.) Post-
mortem decapitation similarly seems to have been used to lay a suspect
corpse to rest. The dataset allowed Reynolds to probe for historical influences
on mortuary practices, revealing, for example, that the introduction of
Christianity led towns to exile the dangerous dead from the new church
graveyards and bury them at the margins of society. (Distant crossroads were
a particular favorite for this, as they give the re-animated corpse lots of
options in terms of direction of travelhopefully not in your direction!
Reynolds says.)

Last year, a similar systematic study was published by Marco Milella, an

anthropologist at the University of Zurich. His project covered the whole of
Western Europe from the first to fifth centuries, confirming that deviant
burials can be discovered well beyond Britain. While Milella warns that
applying concepts derived from later times and completely different cultural
contexts (e.g. vampires) is a risky exercise, his data is powerful evidence that
a fear of the undead wasnt just isolated to the vampires of Eastern Europe.
There were some cross-cultural, systematic forces at work.

In folkloric sources as diverse as Babylonian literature, the shroud-eating

Nachzehrer of Germanic tradition, and the Chiang-Shih hopping vampires of
Chinese legend, notions of corpses rising from the grave have long been
documented. But what these new archaeological datasets reveal is that these
ancient accounts werent just stories that our ancestors told to each other on
dark and stormy nights. Many of our forefathers were genuinely scared, taking
time and trouble to ensure that the dead stayed where they belong.

Why this fear in the first place? One widely accepted explanation, outlined by
the folklorist Paul Barber in his book Vampires, Burial, and Death, is rooted
in the panic that would grip a society during a deadly epidemic. The first
person to die from a disease often would be blamed for the ensuing outbreak,
and the body would be exhumed for investigation. Thanks to the process of
decomposition, the corpse would be found transformed from its previous cold,
pale, and stiff state: Fresh-looking blood would be seeping from the lips; the
face would be ruddy; the body would be engorged, and have a fresh, new
skin that made the nails and hair to appear to have grown. The corpse might
even gasp if a stake was driven through its lungs, releasing foul and noxious
gases, Barber notes.

As for why the threat of vampires and zombie still captivates us today, thats
much harder to pin down, Barber tells me. After all, the science to debunk
these myths is quite a bit stronger than it was centuries ago. Perhaps the
undead stir up our deepest fears about our own mortality? Maybe they simply
make for great television and movies? Rather than entertaining any large-scale
cultural or anthropological explanations, Barber prefers a more grounded
perspective. Who the hell knows? he says.

https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/05/zombie-archaeology/483195/