PAST CRIMESSingle graves are even more of a problem. They are found more often than
mass graves, and have even fewer clues. All the above explanations may apply
as a cause of death–war, massacre, epidemic disease–but we have to add old
age, normal forms of illness, accident, judicial execution and suicide to the
list, along with murder. Even when a person has been deliberately killed, the
evidence may not show up on the skeleton. Poison, suffocation, strangulation,
drowning and soft tissue injuries leave little or no trace in many modern cases,
let alone after hundreds or thousands of years. Even a relatively shallow
wound can lead to a person bleeding to death, if it severs a major artery, but
there would be no mark left on the skeleton for us to see if our only evidence
is the bones. We also have problems to do with what happens to human
remains in the ground (if the body was interred and not cremated). Bones
decay slowly, but they do decay, and in some freedraining, granular and acid
soils, they decay very rapidly indeed. Bones get disturbed in the ground,
particularly if the burial is shallow–by burrowing animals, earthworms, flood
episodes, erosion, ploughing and later building activities. The sheer weight of
soil above a body can crush and distort it, leaving breaks and other damage on
the bones. Bacteria and moulds feed on the remains, reducing them to scraps,
and rainwater leaches out the chemicals within them. The archaeological
osteologist has a hard task.
We also have to address social and religious problems. Over the millennia,
there have been very different approaches to funeral rites. Ancient cremations
rarely reduced whole bodies to ash, and often the remaining fragments were
gathered together from the pyre and placed in bags, boxes or pots, which were
then buried in the ground, perhaps with some offerings or possessions of the
deceased. But many of the smaller bones, from hands and feet, for example,
would be overlooked, and the fire itself would have distorted and mineralised
the remains. We only have part of the information, and that itself has been
distorted, although in some circumstances crucial evidence can be recognised
by an expert.
Interments sometimes leave more clues. But the body may have been
exposed before burial, even dismembered. Dogs or wolves may have gnawed
the bones. In some societies, the practice of‘excarnation’has been observed–
the body is placed in a sacred site until natural processes have removed the
flesh, and only then are the bones gathered and placed in a grave. This
probably happened in Britain, France and other parts of northern Europe in the
Neolithic period, with the bones of at least some people gathered and placed
in long barrows or chambered tombs. Various funerary treatments of the body
may have been undertaken, such as mummification or coating the body in