Locking up corpses to keep them from escaping
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The article doesn't mention out any particularly noteworthy discoveries, it seems to have confirmed what people wrote about burials at the time.
Why?
* Bodies likely needed moving to allow building | roads | something to use the ground.
* It adds evidence (real observation) to "History" (that which is recorded) - the church burials are all carefully logged (to a degree, names, date of birth, date of death, probable cause) - the unconsecrated grounds are unrecorded and "un Historic" (ie not written down).
* Common deformities indicate working habits, nutritional deficits, various diseases, etc. Knowledge of frequency od these things helps build up accurate pictures of slices of European life at various times and locations and add to a big picture.
> The article doesn't point out any particularly noteworthy discoveries
Archeology moved on from treasure hunting and discovery gold masks some time ago, it's been all about picking through trash, toliet pits, and mass graves of commoners for some time.
There's an alternative write up of the same source material in Scientific American:
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/400-year-old-vamp...
and the original source, Dariusz Poliński, has papers in English and Polish
https://scholar.google.com.au/scholar?q=Dariusz+Poli%C5%84sk...
eg: Ancient DNA analysis might suggest external origin of individuals from chamber graves placed in medieval cemetery in Pień, Central Poland
indicates the ability to gather statistics on migration that aren't reliably availablle in other ways.
Your new article mentions several years of excavations, but you're right that saying eighteen years of digging was wrong.
>Bodies likely needed moving to allow building | roads | something to use the ground.
And they were fine waiting eighteen years? Maybe they legally had to, but I'd imagine that would be mentioned. The media loved mentioning that Richard III was found in a car park.
>it's been all about picking through trash, toliet pits, and mass graves of commoners for some time.
For periods before the printing press, sure. We have an abundance of data about the seventeenth century. That's why we know this padlock likely means they were worried the child would be a revenant. Would you see the same value in digging up nineteenth or twentieth century corpses?
>indicates the ability to gather statistics on migration that aren't reliably availablle in other ways.
Maybe he's doing a more scientific analysis on this at the same time, but this revenant nonsense feels rather trivial and exploitative.
For comparison, the seventeenth century is around when you start seeing colonizers taking home bodies of the natives and displaying them. That has started to get some serious blowback, and I don't see this story as being massively better.
> And they were fine waiting eighteen years?
Dunno, possibly somebody dug a well twenty years ago, found bones, they were investigated, and now some infrastructure needs to go through - I have no idea.
> We have an abundance of data about the seventeenth century.
We have an abundance of partial data about the seventeenth century, as I mentioned, as the article mentions, these are unrecorded unconsecrated burials - official town parish records are sort of complete (no instagram photos for example) for some of the population (rich well to do parishioners (oh, actually, kind of like instagram)), blank slates OR biased takes on others (the poor, the not our church folk, any others we don't talk about).
As I mentioned, physical evidence acts to ground truth "History" (that which is written but may have gaps | be incomplete | be biased).
> but this revenant nonsense feels rather trivial and exploitative.
Media sources like to play up this stuff, sure, and that's what one outlet is reporting on, yes.
Back to the archeology work which appear to be looking at and recording everthing; should they record or leave out that some of the bodies appear to be chained and detained in various ways? Should they be noting any related customs and beliefs of the times that might relate to these practices?
> For comparison, the seventeenth century is around when you start seeing colonizers taking home bodies of the natives and displaying them. That has started to get some serious blowback, and I don't see this story as being massively better.
Oooh, I do - I definitely do.
I'm far happier seeing Europeans digging up the graves of their own ancestors on their own grounds than I am seeing Europeans coming over here and cutting off the heads of my great grandparents "for science".
Damn near impossible getting any of them back, to be honest, and the archeologist skill sets are handy for some of those recovered:
They should note the conditions they found the corpses in if they are doing this, with citations to why they think the conditions were like that, but I don't see why they're doing this. The argument that they could always learn more works just as well as a justification for digging up bodies buried in our lifetime too, some of which are also undocumented burials.
>I'm far happier seeing Europeans digging up the graves of their own ancestors on their own grounds
That's an improvement, but then taking pictures of the bodies and publishing them in American publications with a worldwide audience makes it nearly as bad. A Polish person making a spectacle out of a Polish corpse is better than a British person doing it, but they're pretty similar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedlec_Ossuary
Now, there's some spectacle.
Clearly(?) it's not in line with your specific value system that a chandelier of bones is a respectful treatment of soul less body parts.
I do get the impression that it is part of your belief system that others should abide by your mortuary practices and that you get upset if others don't behave in the manner you wish them too.
That seems worse than what is happening here in this story.
Still, at least you're not projecting the mortuary rites of the South Fore upon us all.
Making art out of the bones would be better than parading the corpse around saying "look at how silly their beliefs were."
(allegedly)
The question whether that was the parents, the wider family, the "villagers", .. remains open (I would presume).
Either way, for whatever unkown reason the bodies are being moved, I see no signs that they are being disinterned into chairs and paraded about the town square (something literally happens with the dead in some cultures that you have liturally referenced) .. just the careful, respectful, recording and logging of sites by archeologists.
The issues comes with whether their work should be done or not.
And then with whether it should be on the public record or not.
And lastly with whether media should trawl those records for sensational content or not.
Where is it you draw the line .. I can live without the trashy popular coverage myself.
Others have commented on the graveyard issue, but the pauper issue is more interesting to me. Do you feel it is more enlightening to investigate the tombs of the wealthy?
Where records exist, they are more likely to be about the wealthy, not the poor, who were of course the bulk of the population, as now. The records we have for them are almost all archeological, for who would write about ordinary things? Sometimes there are baptismal or other church records, but not always, and other regions may not even have the local equivalent.
And apart from simply adding to the corpus of historical record, we can learn things that might not be recorded about the rich: famines, levels of violence, climate issues, etc that might be recorded in the bones or other relics (fragments of wood, metal, etc).
There’s lots of intellectual value to be gleaned from the remains of the “paupers”.
It was mostly a description of the graveyard in question, though I imagine they would face far more resistance trying to investigate the royal crypt.
Again, this is the seventeenth century. Famines and violence in the period have fairly significant records.
And if they're finding anything interesting, this article isn't mentioning it, though of course they can't be certain of that going in.