In Italy, in a cemetery dating from the end of the Roman Empire, a child was buried with a stone stuck in his mouth!
The child with the stone in the mouth (V e century), as found in the cemetery of Lugnano, Italy.
"Vampire burial":this is the name that archaeologists have given to a macabre discovery made this summer near Lugnano, in Umbria (Italy) and which has just been made public. In the heart of the "Necropoli dei Bambini », a huge children’s cemetery dating back to the V th century, a small victim of around ten years old was found buried with a stone stuck in her mouth. Deliberately placed after the death of the toddler. "This ancient custom was probably intended to symbolically neutralize the deceased, in order to "prevent" him from returning among the living “, explains Jordan Wilson, bioarchaeologist at the University of Arizona (United States), interviewed by the Washington post .
Deaths due to a violent episode of malaria
Biomolecular analyzes carried out on about fifty other skeletons from the same cemetery confirmed that all the deaths were due to a violent episode of malaria (malaria). "Frightened by all the deaths they couldn't explain, the inhabitants of the city may have resorted to witchcraft ", continues David Soren, professor at the University of Arizona, who has led this work since 1987. By studying an ancient Roman villa, the team from the University of Arizona (Tucson) and Stanford (California) is in effect fell on trenches in which mingled a whole bestiary with the remains of infants:crows' claws, toad bones and bronze cauldrons filled with ashes and sacrificed puppies! A recipe that Harry Potter would not have denied! More seriously, in antiquity, evil spells and superstitious practices were rampant in the countryside of Italy – and elsewhere – to ward off disease and epidemics. Livy was already echoing the 1 st century of these apotropaic rituals, intended to ward off fate. Near the grave of the “Stone Child” was also the body of a 3-year-old girl whose hands and feet had been covered with stones… She also died of malaria. But Lugnano is not the first site to reveal these bizarre post-mortem exorcisms. The list of "vampire" burials would even be quite long.
The "vampire of Venice", found in a 16 th cemetery century of the lagoon of Venice. © University of Florence.
In 2006-2007, excavations undertaken in a 16 th plague-stricken cemetery century, located on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, in the lagoon of Venice, had delivered the remains of a woman in her sixties, in whose mouth a brick had been stuck, as revealed by an article in the Journal of Forensic Sciences . In Ireland, there are several remains from a mass grave of the VIII th century that were collected with these same treatments; as well as in Poland. As for England, a Roman-era burial excavated in 1991 in Stanwick, Northamptonshire - but only disclosed in 2017 - also revealed the presence of a flat stone in the mouth of a dead person. The archaeologists will return to Lugnano next summer to complete the study of the cemetery.