September 2012
116 posts
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Black Death: Can the secrets of London’s plague pits help fight modern diseases?
LONDON — They were the final resting place for victims of the Black Death, but London’s underground medieval plague pits are now unlocking the secrets of modern-day infectious diseases.
The bodies of tens of thousands of Londoners were thrown into communal graves after one of the most devastating...
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Check the morbid listings for Hong Kong’s haunted... →
Hong Kong has one of the most expensive housing markets in the world, with home prices rising 70 percent since 2009. But a new real estate niche market offers greatly discounted home prices, if you’re willing to bunk with the former residents’ ghosts.
Many Hong Kongers believe that the ghosts of people who died violently, thanks to an accident, murder, or suicide, haunt their former...
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The Oddest Ways People Died in Victorian Times →
The Victorian Era may not have had its own version of the Darwin Awards, but thanks to the miracle of newspaper records, we can reflect on the bizarre deaths and disasters of yore. The blog The Baby Died collects morbid clippings from 100 years ago, featuring billiard ball, corset, and umbrella-related demises.
Ross Horsley works at a local history library, where he encounters all manner of...
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Cairo’s City of the Dead, a slum where 500,000... →
Almost 20 million people live in the Cairo metropolitan area, and housing is tight, even in the suburbs. In a neighborhood known as al-Arafa, residents have moved into a necropolis dating back to 600 A.D. In this City of the Dead, there is limited electricity and sanitation, and the deceased take up residency among the living.
Full story and a short video here.
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Taiwan’s funeral strippers dance for a dead crowd →
Should you meet your demise in Taiwan, a funerary option open to you is the Electric Flower Car (EFC), a wheeled, neon-lit platform upon which pulchritudinous women strip down to their skivvies for the benefit of audiences…both living and deceased.
We spoke with University of South Carolina anthropologist Marc L. Moskowitz about this practice, which is detailed in his recent...
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'You can't take your eyes off that door': Death... →
What Cleve Foster remembers most about his recent brushes with death is the steel door, the last one condemned Texas inmates typically walk through before their execution.
‘You can’t take your eyes off that door,’ he says.
But twice over the past year and a half, Foster has come within moments of being escorted through the door, only to be told the U.S. Supreme Court had...
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Did Neandertals Truly Bury Their Dead? →
During excavations in the French Dordogne beginning more than 100 years ago, French archaeologists discovered the skeletons of seven Neandertals, including four children and infants, and the most complete adult Neandertal skull ever found. They concluded that all were deliberately buried, making this site pivotal to contentions that Neandertals had symbolic capacities. Until now, that is. New...
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ITV's undercover investigation into the British... →
A shocking new documentary shows staff from one of the country’s biggest funeral firms making lewd and racist comments towards the dead and their families.
An undercover reporter spent three months working for Gillman Funeral Services, which has six branches in South London and is part of Funeral Partners Ltd, owners of 70 UK funeral businesses. In scenes certain to upset viewers, staff show a...
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chocolateoatmilk asked: hi - i tried reading your latest post but the link to your wordpress blog is set to private so i couldn't. could you make the post/article available in some other kind of way?
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Archaeologists discover funerary chamber more than... →
archaeologicalnews:
MICHOACAN.- The discovery of a funerary chamber of more than a 1,000 years old, in the Archaeological Zone of Tingambato Michoacan, with an unidentified character’s burial, accompanied by 19,000 green stone beads, shells and human bones, is one of the most…
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Unique tombs found in Philippines →
archaeologicalnews:
Archeologists have unearthed remnants of what they believe is a 1,000-year-old village on a jungle-covered mountaintop in the Philippines with limestone coffins of a type never before found in this Southeast Asian nation, officials said Thursday.
National Museum official Eusebio Dizon said the…
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A cemetery of slaves in Rio de Janeiro honored and... →
nmaahc:
“RIO DE JANEIRO — Wearing full-skirted white dresses and turbans, the religious leaders chanted blessings and sprinkled water on the concrete floor of a modest house near this city’s port. Beneath their feet were the remains of tens of thousands of African slaves who had died…
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After the discovery of a 'vampire', Sozopol... →
Archaeological digs in the Bulgarian town of Sozopol on the Black Sea – where earlier this summer archaeologists found a skeleton staked post-mortem to prevent the deceased from rising as a vampire – have yielded another unusual find in the skeleton of a man that appears to have been such an inveterate gambler that he took his knucklebones to the grave.
The skeleton has been provisionally dated...
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Should Richard III - the last Yorkist king - be... →
archaeologicalnews:
Doubt still remains as to whether the remains of a body found beneath a Leicester car park are those of the Plantagenet king Richard III, but debate is already beginning as to whether the last Yorkist monarch should be brought ‘home’.
Mitochondrial DNA tests are…
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Richard lll state funeral after car park skeleton... →
Professor Lin Foxhall, head of Leicester University’s School of Archaeology, explained the ongoing tests on a body found beneath a car park and the chances of it being the remains of Richard lll, killed in the Battle of Bosworth in 1485.
A Conservative MP has called for a state funeral, if DNA tests confirm the identity, saying it follows the tradition for other monarchs.
Chris Skidmore,...
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Ancient Baby Graveyard Not for Child Sacrifice,... →
archaeologicalnews:
A Carthaginian burial site was not for child sacrifice but was instead a graveyard for babies and fetuses, researchers now say.
A new study of the ancient North African site offers the latest volley in a debate over the primary purpose of the graveyard, long thought to be a place of sacred…
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Horrible histories: Why has a Lancashire school's... →
It is the biggest collection of relics in Britain, but few will have heard of it. Now the curator of the historic Catholic school that houses the archives of eyes, skin, skulls and even a part of the supposed Crown of Thorns hopes the funds can be raised to put it on full public display for the first time. Items from Stonyhurst College’s collection are increasingly loaned for exhibitions,...
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Bodies of two Luftwaffe pilots that have lain in... →
A campaign has been launched to move the bodies of two Luftwaffe pilots to a German war cemetery after their single, unmarked grave was discovered 72 years on.
The airmen were buried in the same grave in a Kent churchyard after their two bombers were shot down during a raid on London in August 1940.
Three days later another German bomber crashed in the area, resulting in the remains of four...
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Missing monarchs: The kings who did not rest in... →
DNA tests may be about to prove a skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park are the mortal remains of King Richard III.
And while it may seem extraordinary that a king’s grave could be lost, history shows the last of the Plantagenets was not the only one to suffer such indignity.
Here are seven English kings who have no confirmed grave…
Full article here.
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Two Memorials →
This weekend the Salem Witch Trials Memorial was rededicated, 20 years after its installation and after a year of renovation and fortification by its original mason. The Memorial remains the only Witch-trial-related initiative that I can bear in Salem, and the ceremony marking its re-dedication was, for the most part, simple and respectful, just like the Memorial itself. Descendants of the 20...
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Bones and artifacts found, but so far no ships →
Archaeologists involved in the hunt for the wreckage of the Franklin Expedition in Canada’s Arctic have discovered human remains they believe are from a member of the doomed crew.
Despite bad weather that has hampered some of their plans, the journey has been a productive one so far, says the chief of underwater archeology for Parks Canada, and it should get even better with the addition...
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New Morbid Terminology: Coffin Birth →
I was reading through an article yesterday from the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology titled “The Non-Adult Cohort from Le Morne Cemetery, Mauritius: A Snap Shot of Early Life and Death after Abolition” by Appleby et al. (2012) when I stumbled upon a new term: coffin birth. I guess it seems obvious now what it means, but at first glance my thought was: why on earth would a woman want to...
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Earliest Directly-Dated Human Skull-Cups →
Background
The use of human braincases as drinking cups and containers has extensive historic and ethnographic documentation, but archaeological examples are extremely rare. In the Upper Palaeolithic of western Europe, cut-marked and broken human bones are widespread in the Magdalenian (~15 to 12,000 years BP) and skull-cup preparation is an element of this tradition.
Principal Findings
Here we...
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Suicide prevention strategy backed by £1.5m →
The government has promised to put £1.5m into research exploring how to prevent suicides among those most at risk of taking their own lives.
The pledge comes as ministers unveiled a suicide prevention strategy that aims to cut the suicide rate and provide more support to bereaved families
Funding will be used to look at how the number of suicides can be reduced among people with a history of...
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Coin in the Mouth or Shoe on the Coffin →
In order to cross the river Styx, the deceased need to pay the ferryman Charon. Only after this are they welcome into the afterlife. During the burial, the living place coins either in the mouth or on the eyes of the deceased so that they can pay this fee. The custom is found archaeologically among Greek, Roman and a variety of Western European cultures. It is found in the 5th c. BCE all the way...
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Deep in the Earth, A Tower for the Dead →
Israel Lopez, Elsa Mendoza Andres and Moises Adrian submitted their design for an inverted vertical eco-graveyard to the Evolo’s 2011 Skyscraper Competition and received honorable mention for the concept. The “Tower of the Dead” project proposes that an underground cemetery would be a practical solution for freeing up valuable space in crowded Mexico City and is meant to be an architectural...
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A brief history of restorative arts →
As early as 1200 BCE, the ancient Egyptians were practicing a range of restorative techniques on the emaciated features of the dead from filling the inside of the mouths with sawdust to improve hollowed cheeks to stuffing linen under the eyelids or replacing eyes with stones. They would continue this procedure, tending to any disability, injury or disfigurement until the face and the body were...
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Death special: How does it feel to die? →
IS IT distressing to experience consciousness slipping away or something people can accept with equanimity? Are there any surprises in store as our existence draws to a close? These are questions that have plagued philosophers and scientists for centuries, and chances are you’ve pondered them too occasionally.
None of us can know the answers for sure until our own time comes, but the few...
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The Big Questions: What happens after you die? →
WHAT happens after you die? I can name you 47 men who have tried to harness the rational horsepower of science to answer this most floaty question. Some were physicians, some physicists, some psychologists. Two were Nobel prizewinners. One is a sheep rancher. They have tackled it in labs, in hospital operating rooms, in barns behind their houses. Of them, only one, to date, has landed an...
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Thanatology: Death Education →
Derived from the Greek mythology of Thanatos, the daemon personification of death, thanatology is the academic study of dying, death and grief, and encompasses thoughts, feelings, attitudes, events and the psychological mechanisms of dealing with them.
While the topic is wide-ranging, thanatology further includes sociology, biology, history, theology, psychology, economics, art and literature,...
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Fascinations with Death →
This post isn’t my normal look into news and journal articles that discuss bioarchaeology or mortuary archaeology, instead I want to discuss a recent article that appeared in The Chronicle- a resource that I usually refer to for academic and professional reasons and not for blogging inspiration. However, The Chronicle does have a number of articles that deal with the topic of death, and most...
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The search for a humane way to kill →
The triple-drug cocktail used by many states to kill death-row inmates may not always provide a painless death. Will moving to a new method quiet criticism?
On 1 August this year, Ronald Smith was supposed to die.
He was sentenced to death by the state of Montana for two murders he committed more than 30 years ago. But, after three decades on death row and several planned and postponed...
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GRIEVE FOR THE SOUL – NOT FOR THE BODY →
I MUST fully accept that many will profoundly disagree with me on this but I have never understood why so many have an obsession with the exact location of a body after death.
We have all just witnessed the death of Winnie Johnson whose entire life for 47 years was absorbed with the grief she experienced because she could not exactly place (and retrieve) the remains of her murdered son Keith...
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Rise In Suicides Linked To Recession, Financial... →
Suicides have been on the rise since the recession began in 2008, with the British Medical Journal reporting that economic woe could be to blame for more than 1,000 deaths.
The study shows 846 men and 155 women have committed suicide because of the economic crisis in England, after 20 years of a declining suicide rate.
Clare Wyllie, head of policy and research at Samaritans, said: “It is...
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Watch
Maellyn Macintosh and Andy Pinkney set out to travel across the world in search of the last traditional body modifications. The trailer features Henk Schiffmacher (Hanky Panky) at the Amsterdam Tattoo Museum.
