Medieval villagers mutilated the dead to stop them rising, study finds

The archaeologists who investigated a collect of human rights bones including the remains of adults, girls and children exhumed more than half about a hundred years ago, and dated back to the period between the 11 th and 14 th century scorned shocking possibles including cannibalism in times of dearth, or the butchery of strangers. The slash celebrates were in the wrong neighbourhood for butchery, and isotope analysis of the teeth been demonstrated that the people came from the same expanse as the villagers of Wharram Percy in North Yorkshire a once prospering village which had been completely deserted by the early 16 th century.

The archaeologists investigated 137 patches of busted human bones, may be in the pits of the village. Their judgment, published on Monday in the Journal of Archaeological Science, is that the most plausible rationale for the burn marks and gashes found on the skulls and upper organization bones was deliberate mutilation after extinction. The scientists feel the intention was to keep the dead from walking and spreading cancer or attacking the living.

Simon Mays, skeletal biologist at Historic England, announced: The project that the Wharram Percy bones are the remains of bodies burnt and dismembered to stop them walking from their tombs seems to fit the evidence excellent. If we are right, then this is the first good archaeological proof we have for this practice.

He contributed: It shows us a dark back of medieval ideologies and provides a graphic reminder of how different the medieval view of the world was from our own.

Medieval sources offer many relieves for dealing with the restless dead, believed to be individuals who were evil or cursed in living and still abode a resentment against the living in extinction. Answers included digging up and decapitating or burning the skeletons. The ailment of the Wharram Percy bones been shown that the bodies were decapitated quite soon after extinction, when the bones were still soft, and burned.

Only the devastated church, a few cabins, and a series of humps and bulges in the fields remain of Wharram Percy, once a prosperous village with two manor houses and dozens of more humble mansions. It was extensively exhumed in the 20 th century, and is one of the best documented of millions of villages which were eventually abandoned due to haras, depopulation, or changing agricultural practice.

The bones were from at the least 10 men aged between two and 50, including seven adults, two of them women, and three very young children. They were exhumed in the 1960 s when archaeologists were investigating the foundations of a home, but had not been studied in detail til now. They were buried in three overlapping pits, between the houses, some distance from the church and graveyard.

The scientists scorned cannibalism not uncommon in times of dearth, and exposed at several English locates including the Ice Age human are still at Cheddar Gorge as an explanation because those cut celebrates is commonly be at the seams , not clustered around the brain.

The scientists likewise wondered if the people represented by their scrapped remains could have been strangers, involved with distrust by the villagers. Nonetheless analysis of the isotopes in some of the teeth which can give a distinctive signature exposing where private individuals lived in childhood when the teeth developed showed that they were very local.

Alistair Pike, professor of archaeological disciplines at Southampton, announced: Strontium isotopes in teeth indicate the geology on which an individual was living as their teeth structured in childhood. A parallel between the isotopes in the teeth and the geology around Wharram Percy indicates they grew up in a region close to where the latter are interred, perhaps in the village. This was stunning to us as we first wondered if the unusual care of the bodies might relate to their being from farther afield rather than local.

When the bones were found in the 1960 s the archaeologists thought they were probably older than the village, and belongs to early Romano-British pioneers whose remains were disturbed and reburied by the villagers. The fact has proved to be more sinister.