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I'm a PhD student researching the role of the archaeological dead in contemporary British society. Think of this as a scrapbook of all the interesting links, snippets of information and random bits and bobs I come across pertaining to death, dying and the dead. Enjoy?!

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    Coffins no longer a must in Ireland

    It will no longer be illegal to bury bodies without coffins in the Republic of Ireland from next month.

    Under existing regulations, a body can not be buried unless it is enclosed in a sufficiently strong material such as wood.

    The change was made to facilitate Muslims, who are normally buried without a coffin.

    However, after 1 June, anyone may elect to have a loved one buried without a coffin.

    The Department of the Environment said individual cemeteries could opt out of the arrangement.

    The new rule can be suspended if there is a health or environmental issue, such as a cemetery near a water source.

    (Source: BBC News)

    Dead and Buried is an innovative research project that enagaged a group of young people with the opportunity to work alongside Dr Hannah Rumble, from Bath University’s Centre for Death and Society and Charlotte Chapman, a facilitator from Kumiko Community Arts, to engage in a participatory arts project exploring death and natural burial. The project ran for 7 weeks, meeting one afternoon a week, at The Park local opportunity centre in Knowle West, Bristol. The participants ranged in age from 17 to 25 and all came from very different backgrounds.
    Through a series of structured workshops that provoked questioning and exploration around death and burial, the young people were encourgaed to think critically, to explore these themes and develop a “creative response”. 
    The result was a very successfull week long exhibition at Centrespace Gallery in Bristol in April 2013.

    (Source: Vimeo)

    The Romanian Romeo and Juliet: Mystery of the young couple buried holding hands in courtyard of monastery Archaeologists excavating the inner courtyard of a former Dominican monastery may have discovered a Romanian Romeo and Juliet after unearthing the bodies of a young couple who were buried holding hands. Experts from the Cluj-Napoca Institute of Archaeology and History of Art are working on what they believe is the former cemetery of the monastery have already uncovered several bodies But discovering the couple holding hands was a surprise as double burials were extremely rare in that period. Main researcher Adrian Rusu said: ‘It is a mystery - and rare for such burials at that time. ‘We can see that the man had suffered a severe injury that left him with a broken hip from which he probably died. We believe the injury was caused after he was hit by something very blunt and hard.’ Because of the fact that the young woman obviously died at the same time and was presumably healthy we are speculating that she possibly died of a broken heart at the loss of her partner. (Source: The Daily Mail)

    The Romanian Romeo and Juliet: Mystery of the young couple buried holding hands in courtyard of monastery

    Archaeologists excavating the inner courtyard of a former Dominican monastery may have discovered a Romanian Romeo and Juliet after unearthing the bodies of a young couple who were buried holding hands.

    Experts from the Cluj-Napoca Institute of Archaeology and History of Art are working on what they believe is the former cemetery of the monastery have already uncovered several bodies

    But discovering the couple holding hands was a surprise as double burials were extremely rare in that period.

    Main researcher Adrian Rusu said: ‘It is a mystery - and rare for such burials at that time.

    ‘We can see that the man had suffered a severe injury that left him with a broken hip from which he probably died. We believe the injury was caused after he was hit by something very blunt and hard.’

    Because of the fact that the young woman obviously died at the same time and was presumably healthy we are speculating that she possibly died of a broken heart at the loss of her partner.

    (Source: The Daily Mail)

    The art of burial Ceramics exhibition explores rituals around death. A new ceramics exhibition exploring rituals around death and burial has opened at National Museum Cardiff. The exhibition, Quietus: The Vessel, Death and the Human Body, is the first solo exhibition of acclaimed potter Julian Stair. (Source: BBC News)

    The art of burial

    Ceramics exhibition explores rituals around death.

    A new ceramics exhibition exploring rituals around death and burial has opened at National Museum Cardiff. The exhibition, Quietus: The Vessel, Death and the Human Body, is the first solo exhibition of acclaimed potter Julian Stair.

    (Source: BBC News)

    Elegy for an urban graveyard AT QING MING, the annual two-week-long tomb-sweeping festival that culminates this year on April 4th, Bukit Brown springs to life. The biggest Chinese graveyard outside China, its expanse of lush greenery in the heart of Singapore is for much of the year the peaceful haunt of joggers, birdwatchers, cyclists, strollers and the descendants of those buried there. At Qing Ming, this last group expands. The cemetery becomes crowded with clusters of the filial, visiting their ancestors’ graves. They come because they do so every Qing Ming. But this year, their visits have a greater significance: Bukit Brown is in danger, and has become embroiled in a debate over what sort of country Singapore wants to be. They sweep their ancestors’s graves clean and slash back the foliage with which the jungle tries to reclaim untended tombs. They scrub the headstones and sometimes repaint the epitaphs. They burn joss and candles and strew coloured paper. They make bonfires of paper ghost-money and of gifts for the afterworld. One lucky grandmother this year got a new handbag, a pair of shoes and frock. A great-grandfather, dead these past 80 years, scored an iPhone5 (in replica but, one assumes, preloaded with all the apps a contemporary ghost might need). They leave offerings of fruit, cakes, tea and, sometimes, duck, fish, pork or cockles (to be consumed by the living, with the shells scattered about to symbolise money). Read more.

    Elegy for an urban graveyard

    AT QING MING, the annual two-week-long tomb-sweeping festival that culminates this year on April 4th, Bukit Brown springs to life. The biggest Chinese graveyard outside China, its expanse of lush greenery in the heart of Singapore is for much of the year the peaceful haunt of joggers, birdwatchers, cyclists, strollers and the descendants of those buried there. At Qing Ming, this last group expands. The cemetery becomes crowded with clusters of the filial, visiting their ancestors’ graves. They come because they do so every Qing Ming. But this year, their visits have a greater significance: Bukit Brown is in danger, and has become embroiled in a debate over what sort of country Singapore wants to be.

    They sweep their ancestors’s graves clean and slash back the foliage with which the jungle tries to reclaim untended tombs. They scrub the headstones and sometimes repaint the epitaphs. They burn joss and candles and strew coloured paper. They make bonfires of paper ghost-money and of gifts for the afterworld. One lucky grandmother this year got a new handbag, a pair of shoes and frock. A great-grandfather, dead these past 80 years, scored an iPhone5 (in replica but, one assumes, preloaded with all the apps a contemporary ghost might need). They leave offerings of fruit, cakes, tea and, sometimes, duck, fish, pork or cockles (to be consumed by the living, with the shells scattered about to symbolise money).

    Read more.

    Archaeological News: Richard III's distant relatives threaten legal challenge over burial

    archaeologicalnews:

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    Fifteen living relatives of Richard III, whose body was exhumed from a Leicester car park last year, are threatening to launch a legal challenge seeking the monarch’s reburial in York Minster.

    Although the last English king to die in battle perished almost 500 years before the European…

    Archaeological News: Jewish bones burial an 'historic event' says community

    archaeologicalnews:

    image

    The remains of 17 people suspected to have been killed under 12th Century religious persecution, are to be given a Jewish ceremonial burial in Norwich.

    The bones, which include the remains of 11 children, were found in 2004 during archaeological survey work ahead of the city’s Chapelfield…

    What Remains by Robin Fleming Improper burials tell a story of social change in medieval Britain The outlines of a medieval village near Braunston, Northamptonshire. Photograph: Adrian Warren / Last Refuge Ltd.  While investigating Stonehenge in the late 1920s, archaeologists came across a body buried at the center of the complex. They assumed that it dated, like the megaliths themselves, to the Neolithic period, but radiocarbon dating showed that it most probably dated to the eighth century. The remains were of a short adult male about 30 years of age. He had something called Schmorl’s nodes on his vertebrae, a lesion common in people who performed hard, physical labor as children. The muscle insertions for his upper limbs suggest that he was powerfully built and provide further evidence that this was a man who had done back-breaking work. He had periostitis, too, marked by plaque on the outer surface of his bones, so he suffered from some kind of chronic, low-grade infection. In sum, we have a small, muscled, not very healthy man, who worked hard most of his life. He died, however, neither from disease nor from exhaustion, but because he had been decapitated with a single sword blow from behind. He was probably kneeling when it happened: It looks like an execution. This man’s burial was clearly an anomaly, not least because it was carried out at the center of perhaps the most uncanny site in Britain. It deviated from standard burial customs in other ways. The vast majority of people in eighth-century Britain were buried with their kith and kin, in well-dug graves, and they were placed in the ground with care. Our man lay alone in this eerie landscape, having been dumped into an indecently shallow, horrifyingly short hole in the ground. His ribs may have been broken post mortem, when his corpse was stuffed into its inadequate grave. The burial, moreover, took place in a kind of no man’s land. Stonehenge, by the 11th century, lay on the border of two administrative districts known as hundreds, and many scholars have argued that it marked an important territorial boundary even earlier. It would have been a site known to everyone in the region but inhabited by no one. Read more here.

    What Remains by Robin Fleming

    Improper burials tell a story of social change in medieval Britain

    The outlines of a medieval village near Braunston, Northamptonshire. Photograph: Adrian Warren / Last Refuge Ltd. 

    While investigating Stonehenge in the late 1920s, archaeologists came across a body buried at the center of the complex. They assumed that it dated, like the megaliths themselves, to the Neolithic period, but radiocarbon dating showed that it most probably dated to the eighth century. The remains were of a short adult male about 30 years of age. He had something called Schmorl’s nodes on his vertebrae, a lesion common in people who performed hard, physical labor as children. The muscle insertions for his upper limbs suggest that he was powerfully built and provide further evidence that this was a man who had done back-breaking work. He had periostitis, too, marked by plaque on the outer surface of his bones, so he suffered from some kind of chronic, low-grade infection. In sum, we have a small, muscled, not very healthy man, who worked hard most of his life. He died, however, neither from disease nor from exhaustion, but because he had been decapitated with a single sword blow from behind. He was probably kneeling when it happened: It looks like an execution.

    This man’s burial was clearly an anomaly, not least because it was carried out at the center of perhaps the most uncanny site in Britain. It deviated from standard burial customs in other ways. The vast majority of people in eighth-century Britain were buried with their kith and kin, in well-dug graves, and they were placed in the ground with care. Our man lay alone in this eerie landscape, having been dumped into an indecently shallow, horrifyingly short hole in the ground. His ribs may have been broken post mortem, when his corpse was stuffed into its inadequate grave. The burial, moreover, took place in a kind of no man’s land. Stonehenge, by the 11th century, lay on the border of two administrative districts known as hundreds, and many scholars have argued that it marked an important territorial boundary even earlier. It would have been a site known to everyone in the region but inhabited by no one.

    Read more here.

    Remarkable ringfenced burials from Roman Colchester

    archaeologicalnews:

    image

    A recently-completed cemetery excavation close to Colchester’s Roman circus has revealed that some of Camulodunum’s citizens marked their grave plots with ditches and wooden fences. It had previously been speculated that, during the Roman period, those unable to afford stone monuments might…

    Stonehenge may have been burial site for Stone Age elite, say archaeologists Dating cremated bone fragments of men, women and children found at site puts origin of first circle back 500 years to 3,000BC Centuries before the first massive sarsen stone was hauled into place at Stonehenge, the world’s most famous prehistoric monument may have begun life as a giant burial ground, according to a theory disclosed on Saturday. More than 50,000 cremated bone fragments, of 63 individuals buried at Stonehenge, have been excavated and studied for the first time by a team led by archaeologist Professor Mike Parker Pearson, who has been working at the site and on nearby monuments for decades. He now believes the earliest burials long predate the monument in its current form. The first bluestones, the smaller standing stones, were brought from Wales and placed as grave markers around 3,000BC, and it remained a giant circular graveyard for at least 200 years, with sporadic burials after that, he claims. It had been thought that almost all the Stonehenge burials, many originally excavated almost a century ago, but discarded as unimportant, were of adult men. However, new techniques have revealed for the first time that they include almost equal numbers of men and women, and children including a newborn baby. “At the moment the answer is no to extracting DNA, which might tell us more about these individuals and what the relationship was between them – but who knows in the future? Clearly these were special people in some way,” Parker Pearson said. Read more here.

    Stonehenge may have been burial site for Stone Age elite, say archaeologists

    Dating cremated bone fragments of men, women and children found at site puts origin of first circle back 500 years to 3,000BC

    Centuries before the first massive sarsen stone was hauled into place at Stonehenge, the world’s most famous prehistoric monument may have begun life as a giant burial ground, according to a theory disclosed on Saturday.

    More than 50,000 cremated bone fragments, of 63 individuals buried at Stonehenge, have been excavated and studied for the first time by a team led by archaeologist Professor Mike Parker Pearson, who has been working at the site and on nearby monuments for decades. He now believes the earliest burials long predate the monument in its current form.

    The first bluestones, the smaller standing stones, were brought from Wales and placed as grave markers around 3,000BC, and it remained a giant circular graveyard for at least 200 years, with sporadic burials after that, he claims.

    It had been thought that almost all the Stonehenge burials, many originally excavated almost a century ago, but discarded as unimportant, were of adult men. However, new techniques have revealed for the first time that they include almost equal numbers of men and women, and children including a newborn baby.

    “At the moment the answer is no to extracting DNA, which might tell us more about these individuals and what the relationship was between them – but who knows in the future? Clearly these were special people in some way,” Parker Pearson said.

    Read more here.