Two archaeologists offer surprising new data suggesting people in medieval Europe took items from graves as heirlooms.
Grave from France where the individual was moved around before he fully decomposed. From the collapse of Roman power to the spread of Christianity, most of what we know about the lives of people across Europe comes from traces of their deaths. This is because written sources are limited, and in many areas archaeologists have only found a few farmsteads and villages. But thousands of grave fields have been excavated, adding up to tens of thousands of burials.
In some areas, frequent discoveries of ransacked graves created an image of pillage and violation of the dead, which came to be seen as typical of the post-Roman power vacuum across Europe. In some cases the violations were not even attributed to strangers: earlier 20th-century French archaeologists believed that reopened graves reflected the barbaric nature of the Germanic tribes then thought to have used the cemeteries and to have robbed their own relatives.
In our research, we collected and re-assessed thousands of records of disturbed burials in several countries to understand when graves were re-entered and what exactly was done to their contents. We show that the reopening practices have similarities across Europe, especially the careful selection of artefacts.
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