نقلا عن ناشونال جيوجرافيك نيوز
Nationalgeographic Daily News
فقد وجد علماء الأثار بموقع تنقيب على الطريق السريع قرب
مدينه Gliwice, Poland ببولندا
قبرا يشتبه أنه لمصاص دماء
الخبر كامل بلغه المصدر
الخبر كامل بلغه المصدر
Heather Pringle
for National Geographic
Published July 15, 2013
When archaeologists opened an ancient grave at a highway
construction site near Gliwice,
Poland, they
came across a scene from a horror movie: a suspected vampire burial.
Interred in the ground were skeletal remains of humans whose
severed heads rested upon their legs—an ancient Slavic burial practice for
disposing of suspected vampires, in hopes that decapitated individuals wouldn't
be able to rise from their tombs.
But the recent Polish discovery isn't the first time that
archaeologists have stumbled upon graves of those thought to be undead. Here's
what science has to tell us about a few of history's famous revenant suspects.
How to Bury the Undead
To date, researchers have reported suspected vampire burials
in both the Old World and the New World.
In the 1990s, University
of British Columbia archaeologist
Hector Williams and his colleagues discovered an adult male skeleton whose body
had been staked to the ground in a 19th-century cemetery on the Greek island of Lesbos. Whoever buried the man had
driven several eight-inch-long iron spikes through his neck, pelvis, and ankle.
"He was also in a heavy but nearly completely decayed
wooden coffin," says Williams, "while most of the other burials [in
the cemetery] were simply in winding sheets in the earth." Clearly, someone
did not want the man to escape the grave. But when physical anthropologists
studied the skeleton, Williams adds, they "found nothing especially unusual
about him."
More recently, an archaeological team led by University of Florence
forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini came across another suspected vampire
burial on the Italian island
of Lazzaretto Nuovo. In
this case, the body proved to be that of an elderly woman, who was apparently
interred with a moderate-sized brick in her mouth—a recorded form of exorcism
once practiced on suspected vampires in Italy.
Then there's the New World.
In the 1990s, archaeologists working in a small 18th- to 19th-century cemetery
near Griswold, Connecticut, came across something highly
unusual: the grave of a 50-something-year-old man whose head and upper leg
bones had been laid out in a "skull and crossbone" pattern.
Upon examination, physical anthropologists determined that
the man had died of what was then called "consumption"—and what is
now known as tuberculosis. Those who suffer from this infectious disease grow
pale, lose weight, and appear to waste away—attributes commonly linked both to
vampires and their victims.
"The vampire's desire for 'food' forces it to feed off
living relatives, who suffer a similar 'wasting away,'" the researchers
noted in a paper in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. To play it safe, local inhabitants seem to
have decapitated the body of the suspected vampire.
The Dead Truth
Most archaeologists now think that a belief in vampires
arose from common misunderstandings about diseases such as tuberculosis, and
from a lack of knowledge about the process of decomposition.
Although most 19th-century Americans and Europeans were
familiar with changes in the human body immediately following death, they
rarely observed what happened in the grave during the following weeks and
months.
For one thing, rigor mortis eventually disappears, resulting
in flexible limbs. For another, the gastrointestinal tract begins to decay, producing
a dark fluid that could be easily mistaken for fresh blood during
exhumation—creating the appearance of a postprandial vampire.
When and where the next one will appear is anyone's guess.
