Children’s remains were held down with boulders in a cemetery in central Italy, possibly to stop “revenants” rising from the dead.
In Italy, archaeologists are finding the remains of babies, kids, and sacrificial puppies at a 1,600-year-old burial site.
A child who was interred with a block in their mouth, for example, indicates that people may have been concerned that their dead relatives may come back to life as “revenants,” or corpses who are revived after death, according to archaeologists. According to an analysis of the graves, several of the deceased had malaria.
Locals speculated that this child would have been thought of as a vampire in 2018, but recent study reveals that this is untrue. Locals began to speculate that the youngster was a vampire and dubbed him the “Vampire of Lugnano,” and the media helped promote this rumor. Archaeologists now have more time to fully comprehend what the infant may have been perceived as: perhaps a revenant.
The cemetery is located in the ruins of a Roman villa at the archaeological site of Poggio Gramignano, in central Italy, that dates to the fifth century A.D., a time when the Western Roman Empire was collapsing. By this time, many people in the Roman Empire had converted to Christianity.
One of the burials found in the 1,600-year-old cemetery. (Image credit: Noelle Soren)
Excavations at the site started in the 1980s and continue today. Since then, archaeologists have unearthed a large number of dog remains, many of them from puppies. Dog burials from this period “are often associated with children as tomb protectors and puppies would have been an especially lively and fresh sacrifice with perhaps more potency for remedy for the community,” David Soren(opens in new tab), a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona who is one of the team leaders, told Live Science in an email.
Some of the children were buried in unusual ways. One child, for instance, had a piece of mortar in their mouth, and others seem to have been buried with their limbs weighed down with stones. “There was tremendous fear of revenants and of mysterious forces [such as witches] who might harness the spirits of the dead for their own devices,” Soren said. Fear of the undead was common among both Christians and non-Christians from this period.
Dog sacrifices, puppies in particular, were found in the cemetery. The skeleton of a puppy is seen here. (Image credit: Noelle Soren)
Analysis of the human remains indicate that many of them were suffering from malaria. This outbreak also may have influenced people to bury children in this way. “Stones in the mouth or over the body to weigh it down were seen as apotropaics [having the power to avert evil] to protect the as yet unaffected community,” Soren said.
Around this time, there was “a sense of a constant struggle with the supernatural and it is not surprising to see such things in a cemetery where people were facing a severe outbreak of malaria,” William Bowden(opens in new tab), a professor of classics and archaeology at the University of Nottingham in the U.K. who was not involved in the research, told Live Science in an email.
An important aspect of this site is how carefully it was excavated, John Pearce(opens in new tab), a senior lecturer of archaeology at King’s College London, told Live Science in an email. This meticulousness allows for a detailed reconstruction of the rituals that were performed on the deceased, Pearce noted.
Source: livescience.com
