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JUL 15, 2015 @ 08:04 AM 8,223

Not All Strange Burials Are Vampires Or Zombies

Kristina Killgrove, CONTRIBUTOR

Opinions expressed by Forbes Contributors are their own.

You may have seen a number of recent news items about Greek zombies and
Polish vampires. In bioarchaeology terms, these are called revenant graves, a
form of burial made to ensure the corpse did not rise again from the dead. But
some archaeologists are questioning whether these types of graves, when viewed
within the context of centuries of burial in Western Europe, are really all that
strange.

Writing last month in the journal PLOS One, Marco Milella, Valentina Mariotti,
Maria Giovanna Belcastro, and Chris Knsel report their survey of 375 irregular
burials from Britain and continental Europe dating to between the 1st and 5th
centuries AD. In the typical practice in this time and geographic area, a body is
laid out in a grave face-up, as if the person is lying down for a nap. Irregular
burials, however, often include prone [face-down] burials and inhumations with
evidence of modification of the corpse or skeleton (beheading and other
mutilations, including transfixion of the body with nails, they write. A burial can
also be considered irregular if the position of the grave is different if the grave is
located outside a cemetery or in a different orientation than the others.
A picture taken on June 14, 2012 shows a skeleton with an iron piece before being exposed at the
National History museum in Sofia. The ancient skeleton of a man, pinned down in his grave in order not
to turn into a vampire, piqued interest in Bulgaria this week, where vampire tales and rites still keep
their bite even nowadays. The 700-year-old skeleton -- unearthed in the necropol of a church in the
Black Sea town of Sozopol earlier in June -- was stabbed in the chest with an iron rod and had his teeth
pulled before being put to rest. AFP PHOTO / NIKOLAY DOYCHINOV (Photo credit should read NIKOLAY
DOYCHINOV/AFP/GettyImages)

Explanations for the reasoning behind these irregular burials vary depending on
the time and place. Most of them are linked to the so-called necrophobic
hypothesis or the idea that people feared the dead. In other cases, researchers
have suggested irregular burials may have been made by a population that
wanted to ward off other early deaths or disease or that irregular burials may
represent executions or other members of a society who were marginalized in
some way. Milella and colleagues, however, consider irregular burials within the
context of Western Europe to attempt to identify patterns in the practice.

Their survey took into account hundreds of burials in which at least one of the
following was present: prone position of burial; evidence of decapitation;
mutilation of the body; nails in or near the body. Most of the irregular burials,
though, were either prone or showed displacement of the head, as in
decapitation.

Figure 1 from Milella et al. Geographical distribution of the prone burials and burials with the cephalic
extremity displaced. Each dot represents a site. Grey and black dots indicate, respectively, prone burials
and burials with the cephalic extremity displaced. Note the wide distribution of prone burials in both
Continental Europe and Britain, and the cluster of burials with the cephalic extremity displaced in the
latter. (Image used under a CC BY 4.0 license via PLOS.)

While prone burials were found throughout Britain and Continental Europe,
Milella and colleagues discovered that displaced heads are almost always found
in southern Britain, with only few examples from Continental Europe. But the
displaced heads are also associated strongly with grave goods, coffins, and the
presence of footwear, and even with prone burials. Similarly, in Continental
Europe, prone burials are closely associated with the presence of a coffin and
grave goods. Burials with coffins and grave goods are more likely to hold prone
burials than they are to hold skeletons with displaced heads, however.

As to interpretation, Milella and colleagues think that complicated social

processes were at work. This time period covers the rise and fall of the Roman
Empire , as well as the spread of Christianity, both of which heavily influenced
changes in burial customs. But considering what we know archaeologically and
historically about cultural contact in Europe during the Iron Age and into the
Roman period, the researchers postulate a link between the wide distribution of
practices like prone burials and similar processes yet recognize that questions
pertaining to the causes leading to the performance of such funerary practices are
left unanswered.

Still, in considering the rapid cultural changes that were brought about by Roman
imperialism, Milella and colleagues suggest that perhaps funerary treatments
such as prone depositions and decapitation were in some way connected to this
cultural crisis following such changes but that it is difficult to test in the absence
of more precise dating and associated regional archaeological contextual
information. As Britain was only partially incorporated into the Roman Empire,
the differences in patterning of irregular burials throughout Europe could be
related to the spread of Roman culture.
An archaeologist cleans a skeleton on June 12, 2012 during archaeological excavations in the city of
Veliko Tarnovo, about 220 kms east of the capital Sofia. Another centuries-old skeleton of a man who
was subjected to a ritual to stop him from turning into a vampire was unearthed in central Bulgaria on
June 12. Archaeologist Nikolay Ovcharov said that the skeleton was tied to the ground with four iron
clamps, while burning ambers were placed on top of his grave. AFP PHOTO / BGNES (Photo credit should
read BGNES/AFP/GettyImages)

Since most of the irregular burials surveyed do not seem to be of marginalized

individuals, Mirella and colleagues also suggest that they may instead be
correlated with patterns of social and cultural affiliation. Even the instances of
decapitation may not reflect violence but even in specific instances more
positive or respectful attitudes and beliefs. The lack of findings of burials that are
both prone and decapitated, however, suggests there are at least two different
explanations at work for these irregular burial practices.

"Deviant or irregular burials often capture our attention because of the unusual
or even shocking ways that bodies in the past have been treated," University of
South Alabama bioarchaeologist Lesley Gregoricka, who has studied irregular
burials in Poland, tells me. For bioarchaeologists, though, "the more important
questions lie in what meaning can be tied to such treatment, and how this
meaning is grounded in particular social and historical contexts," she says.

This article is one of the first to survey irregular burials in Europe, with the goal of
determining whether there are patterns to the graves and whether there are
good historical or archaeological interpretations of them. If more of these sorts
of graves are published, Mirella and colleagues believe that irregular burials can
be better discussed not as isolated case studies but rather in their multi-
dimensional context, [ and] in a sociocultural perspective.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/kristinakillgrove/2015/07/15/not-all-strange-burials-are-vampires-or-
zombies-archaeologists-warn/#46d9911a766d