Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber

And they are not uncommon: the folklorist Paul Barber has described numerous Celtic sites from the Iron Age featuring deviant burials and, more recently, the ‘dangerous dead’ of Britain and Ireland have been discussed by Mays, John Blair and Matthew Beresford. While the vampires of folklore were often disinterred and mutilated after supposed revenant attacks, anyone already considered suspect in life could suffer deviant burial on first interment. Elsewhere we see decapitation, piercing of the heart and other areas with nails and burial in swamps or bogs. Meanwhile, Czech skeletons found weighted with rocks on their chests in Mikulovice some years before were thought to be around 5,000 years old. In 2012 Bulgarian archaeologists working near Sozopol found several centuries-old skeletons with iron rods through their chests. The most well-known type of deviant burial is probably the classic staking of a vampiric corpse, usually associated with continental Europe. On the other, explicit historical records can offer possible explanations for the more baffling types of deviant burial, such as that at Stanwick. On the one hand, archaeologists have shown how far back our fear of the living dead goes. These burials are vital in showing how history and archaeology can mutually inform one another. Fear of such threats has resulted in many other 'deviant' burials across Europe, in which corpses were effectively scapegoated for a range of problems, from fatal contagion to severe weather. Simon Mays, Historic England’s human skeletal biologist, said in an interview in the Guardian that this mutilation was thought to be unique in Romano-Britain and that ‘The fact that he’s buried face down in the grave is consistent with somebody whose behaviour marked them out as odd or threatening within a community’. Buried face down, the corpse's tongue had been cut out and replaced with a flat stone. In late January this year news broke of an unusual Roman British skeleton from Stanwick, Northamptonshire.

Vampires, Burial, and Death by Paul Barber