In anticipation of Halloween there’s an extremely cool article at the web site of Archaeology Magazine, the publication of the Archaeological Society of America. It’s a round-up of fourteen other articles on the archaeology of vampires, curses, zombies, and other hair-raising subjects. Here’s a snippet from the feature on exorcising a plague vampire:
Picture a 16th-century plague victim, wrapped in a cloth shroud and buried. Now picture a gravedigger, assigned to the terrible work of opening a mass grave to put more bodies in. He scrapes the dirt away from the face and finds, to his horror, that the corpse is trying to eat its way out. Where the shroud covers the mouth there is a dark, bilious stain and the cloth has been worn through. As if it wasn’t already difficult enough to dig graves for plague victims, he now has to deal with the undead–a malicious, pestilent vampire. The solution, a sort of vampire exorcism, would have been to cram a brick in the corpse’s mouth to prevent it from eating its way out of the grave and spreading the plague. It is the stuff of legend, but there’s something to it–a good scientific reason why it would appear a corpse was trying to eat its way out of the grave, and clear archaeological evidence for exorcism by brick. Senior Editor Samir S. Patel spoke with University of Florence forensic anthropologist and archaeologist Matteo Borrini after the meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Science in Denver, where he presented an “exorcised” skull from a plague grave on the Venetian island of Lazzaretto Nuovo.
Pictured above: a collection of curse tablets found in the vicinity of the residence of the Roman governor of Judea
That’s a great find – in both senses.