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Money and Mortality: Shifts in Commemoration due to Economic Change
Money not only shapes the way that you live, it also can determine the manner of your death. From cemeteries we can infer social status and wealth based on the presence of exotic artifacts and more...
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Ring-Fenced Burials from Roman Colchester
Sometimes, when we discover burials through archaeological excavation we don’t find markers or above ground indicators that the burial was located there. The cemetery is found because of construction,...
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St. Patrick’s Day
St. Patrick was born in 387 CE in Great Britain, not Ireland, and he was considered a pagan for the early years of his life. When he was 16, he was captured by Irish marauders and taken back to Ireland...
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London’s Newest Plague Pit
claimtoken-5149b056b7c8b The Crossrail project is aimed at creating a 73 mile railway in southeast London. Concerns raised about the new fast and efficient railway was that it could destroy...
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Digitally Mapping Graveyards
Over the past few weeks I have been working on mapping a cemetery in a Geographic Information System (GIS) as both part of a class and part of my own research. I received a number of question and...
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Health and Wealth in 17th and 18th c. German Population
In modern societies, perfect health and being in-shape are often associated with wealth. Those who have more money have better access to healthier food, ability to hire nutritionists, access to the...
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Between Death and Burial
There are many things that can happen to a body between death and burial. A good example of this process is Weekend at Bernie’s. Bernie Lomax is murdered within the first twenty minutes of the movie,...
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On feasting, food and funerals
This past Tuesday I had the pleasure of attending Anthony Bourdain’s Guts and Glory tour, his first live tour that consists of 75 minutes of fantastic food and travel rants. Throughout his expletive...
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Learning About Life From Death in Akhenaten’s Egypt
The city of Amarna was a 17 year period of change and drama in Egypt’s ancient history. It was established as the capital city of Egypt in 1353 BC during the late 18th dynasty by Pharaoh Akhenaten. He...
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Conversion to Christianity in Viking Age Scandinavia
Examining religion is a tricky thing to do, especially in societies that are over a thousand years gone and have lost large amounts of their archaeological record. First, it can be difficult to tell...
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Examining the Richard III Evidence
Richard III is a highly controversial figure from English history, and this legacy continues today. Shakespeare wrote of him as a villain, exaggerating his scoliosis and writing his malicious...
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Bede, Burials, and Bamburgh: Testing Anglo-Saxon Migration
The traditional story of the settlement of England by the Anglo-Saxons is based on the writing of the Venerable Bede from 731 CE. He wrote: “These new-comers were from the three most formidable races...
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On Food and Funerals in the Middle Neolithic
I’ve talked before about the close relationship between food and funerals, specifically in relationship to what Anthony Bourdain has taught me about the importance of food within cultures. The food...
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Morbid Terminology: Coffin vs. Casket
There are many different types of containers that the deceased were buried in, often chosen based on the cultural norms of the group, the context of the death or burial, or may be due to personal...
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I’m So Hungry I Could Eat a Horse
“The horse is a noble animal. This opinion is widely shared in Anglo-Saxon countries where it is felt that it is an ignoble action to eat a noble animal, and one which is an intimate friend of man, on...
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Investigating Kinship in an Early Medieval Necropolis
There used to be an assumption within archaeology that people who were buried within the same grave or same necropolis were related to one another. In geography, we call this Tobler’s First Law:...
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Grave Robbing: Not Always What it Seems…
We’ve talked quite a bit here about the different ways that human remains can be disturbed once they are buried. We’ve had the “5 Reasons to Remove Single Bones from a Grave“, “Five Reasons for Moving...
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Changing Funerary Trends: Now and Then
Death is a universal phenomenon. Everybody dies. And to quote Ricky Gervais “usually at the end of their lives and just the once, and forever“. The way that people deal with the deceased however is...
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Bone Churches and Deathly Decorations
Every few months, the photos of the famous bone decorated churches make their rounds through the internet through more popular websites. There seems to be a continuing macabre fascination with these...
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More Bone Churches and Deathly Decorations
Following from our discussion on Tuesday, we’re going to be going through the history and context of three more sacred spaces decorated with bones. Following this we will be able to talk a little about...
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