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The post-Dominican St. Dominic’s Church in Płock is one of the oldest sacral buildings in the city. Together with the adjacent monastery, it bears witness to the functioning of the so-called “Górki” community, comprising three denominations: Catholics, Protestants, and the Orthodox. The Romanesque complex was erected no later than the third decade of the thirteenth century, and it held significance on the map of medieval and modern Płock. The buildings themselves have undergone little change over the centuries, making the church and monastery locations with great research potential. Regrettably, the building has not yet been subjected to comprehensive archaeological research, preceded by a source query. Rectifying this situation was the primary goal of the project “At the Intersection of Faiths and Cultures – Research on the History of St. Dominic’s Church in Płock” funded by the “Grants4NCUStudents” budget. As part of it, a research team from the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Toruń conducted preliminary archaeological research of the crypts under St. Dominic’s Church in 2022. During a series of field trips, numerous boreholes were made in the crypt space as well as in the cellars under the east wing of the monastery. The backfill of the northern entrance hole was also cleared. The preliminary work facilitated further exploration of the strata undisturbed during the cleaning work carried out in the crypt in the twentieth century. The research led to the discovery of the remains of approximately 120 people, with the bones of 16 people deposited in an ossuary made of a wooden box. Artefacts of material culture were also recovered, which allowed to date the moment and sequence of changes occurring in the crypts. The results of the conducted research enabled the precise development of a further research strategy for the post-Dominican complex in Płock.

To investigate the presence of trepanations in an early Modern Age, skeletal collection documented in medical treatises but infrequently reported in osteological collections. Analyses were conducted on 387 non-adult crania from the ossuary in the church of the Assumption of Valdepeñas (16th - 18th C.), Ciudad Real, Spain. All complete or semi-complete crania of non-adults (aged 3–20 years) were macroscopically examined. Trepanation was detected in two adolescents aged 14 and 20 years; no evidence of their survival was observed. These findings suggest that trepanation was carried out in rural areas as Valdepeñas in the 16th-18th centuries, where the selection of instruments indicates knowledge of contemporaneous medical treatises. The present study provides new data on trepanation and how it was performed in adolescents during this period. Understanding the motive for these interventions is highly challenging in the absence of bone lesions, and their occurrence is likely underestimated due to the scant research in skeletal remains from the early Modern Age. Further palaeopathological analyses of osteological collections from this period will provide more information about how this surgical technique was perfected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Memorials of the lay dead in late medieval English churchyards were constructed from perishable materials, with the exhumation and reuse of burial plots suggesting that a timely forgetting of the individual was an accepted part of the commemorative process. From the 13th century onward, remains exhumed from old graves were increasingly redeposited in specific structures known as charnel houses. The collective redeposition of disarticulated skeletal remains in charnels anonymised the deceased, generating mortuary spaces which foregrounded communal rather than individual memory. In this paper, charnelling and its relation to memory in late medieval England is theorised and explored. Following this, early modern developments are investigated, employing the charnel of St. Paul's Cathedral, London, as a central case study. As the country's largest late medieval charnel, its extreme treatment following the Dissolution of the Monasteries renders it a potent example of how religious reform affected mortuary practice during the period. Through the violent ejection of its contained remains and the structure's secular repurposing as a print shop, treatments of the ancestral dead were employed to enact and manifest ideological change. This produced changes in London's mortuary landscape which in turn memorialised the reformatory process itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A stone fragment bearing a Hebrew or Aramaic inscription was discovered in the debris piled up along the Early Roman period Stepped Street in the Tyropoeon Valley, on the west slope of the City of David hill. The inscription preserves part of a list mentioning proper names and sums of money. Similar lists are known from the Second Temple period, commonly interpreted as payment received or rendered from individuals. This is the first inscription to be found inside the city. It is unclear whether the inscription was connected to the ossuary on which it was inscribed, perhaps by the ossuary craftsman? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This study investigates the composition and corrosion of a lead ossuary excavated from the archaeological cemetery located on the site of the Queen Alia International Airport, Jordan. It also presents its conservation treatment using the potentiostatic reduction method. X-ray fluorescence (XRF) and scanning electron microscopy/ energy dispersive X–ray spectroscopy (SEM/EDX) analyses showed that the ossuary was made from a relatively pure lead metal. Examination of the corrosion products using X–ray diffraction (XRD) and SEM/EDX analyses indicated the presence oxides, carbonates and chlorides of lead as the main corrosion products on the ossuary. The metallographic examination showed a cast α-Pb dendritic microstructure. A linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) scan for a small fragment from the ossuary in a sodium sulfate solution allowed identifying the working conditions to reduce the corrosion products to lead metal. Chronoamperometry (CA) techniques helped to monitor the reduction process and determine its completion. The potentiostatic methods showed an excellent effectiveness in determining treatment parameters and monitoring the reduction process of the corrosion products on the ossuary and to prevent over-treatment. The reduced ossuary was finally coated with Paraloid B72 to prevent corrosion reoccurrence in the poor environmental conditions of the storage area.

Copyright of Ge-Conservación is the property of Instituto del Patrimonio Cultural and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The sourcing of cadavers for North American skeletal reference collections occurred immediately after death and targeted the poor and marginalised. In Europe, collections sourced bodies that were buried and unclaimed after some time in cemeteries with no perpetual care mandate, and may have also targeted the underprivileged. The relationship between socio-economic status (SES) and abandonment was examined in a sample of unclaimed remains (603 adults and 98 children) collected from cemeteries in the city of Lisbon, Portugal, that were incorporated in a collection. Results demonstrate that low SES individuals are not more likely to be abandoned nor to be incorporated in the collection than higher SES individuals. Furthermore, historical data indicate that the poorest were not incorporated into the collection, because of burial practices. Although the accumulation of collections in North America was facilitated by structural violence that targeted the poor and marginalised, this phenomenon seems largely absent in the Lisbon collection.

The paper describes two ceramic funerary vessels from Southern Kazakhstan. The first one is an oval elongated ossuary (solid, with no lid or ornamentation, on legs), discovered in the middle reaches of the Arys river. The second vessel is a khum with a lid and special lugs on the body for tying the lid, discovered near Shymkent settlement, possibly on its Early Medieval necropolis. This vessel is exhibited in the Museum of Local Lore of Shymkent.These unique findings are associated to the Zoroastrian/Mazdean burial technique of the Middle Syr Darya region. According to scientific information, since the 5th century AD the catacomb burial rite was replaced with the Naous rite across the entire right bank of the Syr Darya. This rite consisted in subsequent final burial of bone remains in ceramic vessels or other containers, or without them, in dedicated locations of the landscape, not associated with the active life of society. The discovery of the ossuary and funerary khum is extremely important for the reconstruction of the local version of the Zoroastrian funerary rite of the region practiced in the 5th – 8th centuries AD.

Copyright of Archaeologia Historica is the property of Masaryk University, Faculty of Arts and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Richly embellished tombs of powerful Sogdian immigrants found in China have greatly increased our knowledge on Central Asians who were active along the so-called Silk Road during medieval times. Sino-Sogdian funerary monuments often display scenes such as banquets, hunts, and funerals with images of Sogdian Zoroastrian deities that offer interesting parallels with Sogdian paintings and ossuaries from pre-Islamic sites in modern Uzbekistan and Tajikistan. The comparative study of the representations of the passage into the Zoroastrian underworld in Sino-Sogdian art and several Sogdian ossuaries could shed new light on the identification of Zoroastrian deities and rituals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethno- archaeological Study on relationship Bakhtiari Nomads and khereft-khaneArchaeologist for a long times study on today’s societies at some theories as direct historical approach and with ethnographic data reconstruction last societies. A part of their researches what is there in folklore. According to what today there is among the people living in the Bakhtiari region, some of people believe that some archaeological remains as ossuaries are in relation with nomads and believe that they placed old people there to during immigration. What is examined in this article, the geographic area is considered as a field of research at first and then look anthropologically, Bakhtiari people and their customs review and with an archaeological approach, new archaeological study data, attempts to assess this matter that it comes from the minds of the general public due to their lack of familiarity with detailed user sees these works.keywords: Ossuary, Bakhtiari Nomads, Ethnography, Archaeology, Ancient Iran

Copyright of Anuario de Estudios Americanos is the property of Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Three chapters from the history of archaeological investigations of the town of Trhové Sviny. This contribution points out several earlier archaeological finds from Trhové Sviny which are documented by archival sources. Another part of the contribution describes the contents of the archaeological collection of the former district museum at Trhové Sviny, which contained numerous finds from various prehistoric and medieval sites in the region. When the museum was abolished, the collection was deposited in the attic of the local elementary school. Its further fate is unfortunately unknown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The anthropological research of the ossuary in the Church of St. James in Brno took place between the years 2011 and 2012. The research was connected with the reconstruction of the ossuary and its opening to the public. As it was to be cleared up and re-arranged, the aim of this research was to rescue and examine the original human skeletons buried in the church. It was impossible to examine all skeletal remains due to capacity and technical limitations, therefore only a localized probe in the crypt and subsequent laboratory research could be carried out. During 14 days of field research eight cubic meters of skeletal remains were anthropologically examined, minimal and maximal number of individuals was calculated, preservation of skeletal remains was described as well as the frame contents of a sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on Italy’s Fascist ossuaries of the First World War. It is intended to show how a methodology that uses images and texts can expose the political purposes that underpinned the creation of the ossuaries, to contribute to the literature on the commemoration of fallen soldiers, and to advance the study of war monuments as expressions of political forces. The paper also represents an attempt to bridge between different approaches to the study of war monuments that have emerged in history and in visual studies. It examines Italian ossuaries of the Great War as both objects and symbols, or as aesthetic configurations and carriers of political meanings. Physical characteristics, such as those associated with context, space and style, are shown to express elements of Fascist ideology relating, for instance, to hierarchy, victory and power.

When the Monk's Kop ossuary was excavated in 1964, the incomplete remains of 64 human adults, 16 juveniles and five infants were recovered. These remains, held in collections at the Zimbabwe National Museum of Human Sciences in Harare and at the University of the Witwatersrand, were studied as part of a larger project to assess the health status of past populations of the southern African region. Since the archaeological context of the remains remained insufficiently explored, a survey and documentation project of the site was undertaken. The relationships between archaeological sites, ossuaries, and the prehistoric utilisation of the landscape remain unclear and require further study. The Monk's Kop ossuary was identified archaeologically with the Musengezi tradition, dated to the end of the 12th to early 16th century AD. The archaeological context of the ossuary remains is considered in this article, as part of the site within a multi-phased larger landscape of sites and cultural remains of various origins. The possible interactions between spatial organisation, topography, and cultural and ritual practice and identity are preliminarily considered based on the available evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper revisits the little-examined remains of the funerary church discovered in the vicinity of the monastery of Žiča in 1938. It takes a look at the analogous examples of this type of buildings, notably the remains discovered at the monastery of Studenica of Hvosno and the ossuary at the monastery of Bachkovo. It also looks at the rules for monastic burial laid down in the surviving typika of the eleventh/twelfth century, and at different monastic burial practices in the area of the autocephalous Serbian Church. It puts forward the assumption that the funerary chapel formed an integral part of the original complex of the monastery of Žiča, that it was built in the 1220s, and that it lost its original function sometime in the fourteenth century.

An archaeological excavation undertaken in the burial vault of the Saint-Pierre church in Épernon led to the discovery of various archaeological remains (ossuary, mummified bodies, sawn skulls, and tombstone), most of which date back to the Modern period. The study reveals specific burial practices. The paper examines the history of this burial place, the aims of its study, and the main results, with particular focus on the protocol developed to study the ossuary. Results underline the usefulness of the analysis of such kind of funerary feature. They highlight links between partially preserved mummified remains and some bones scattered in an ossuary that have been rearranged many times.

This paper deals with the issue of a common grave or so-called ossuary with entrance hall - found in the deepest layer at Vinča. The paper is based on the research conducted by M. Vasić in 1931 and 1934. The published information and interpretations of the grave have been corrected and supplemented with analysis of unpublished field documentation and study collection.

Man is the only being preserving their dead (Edgar Morin). Over time, man has created different devices able to keep alive the memory of the deceased. The real trace (remains), the symbolic trace (photos, films, objects that belonged to the departed) and the virtual trace (the Facebook wall turned into a memorial) are attempts, characterising specific periods of time, to keep the absent present, by preserving something of the identity of those who have passed away. If in the past ossuaries were a kind of museum of worldly remains (often with a moralising purpose), today social media tend to become vast virtual cemeteries (frequently playing a consolatory role for those who are left behind). Statistics show that in 2010 there were, on Facebook, over 5 million pages of dead people, many of them transformed in genuine memorials. How the Romanian, Orthodox world is dealing in the long run with the need to store the other's traces is the question that the present paper tries to answer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During surveys over the southern part of the Kuh-e Hossein range and east of Naqš-e Rostam, a group of three pairs of rock-cut niches (two unfinished) was found at the foot of high cliffs rising above the foothills in 2012. Next to the niches nine engraved inscriptions were discovered. A year later an epigraphic study was carried out in order to decipher the Middle Persian texts. These rock-cut niches are in line with previously documented inscribed funerary remains in the surroundings of the historical city of Estahr: the inscriptions depict them as dahmag. Less than 1 m in size, they should most probably be interpreted as ossuaries or cavities cut in the rock to shelter mobile ossuaries. The style of script suggests dating these funerary remains back to a period no earlier than the 7th century AD, most probably during the early decades of Islamic domination. These new tombs enhance our knowledge of the rich funerary landscape along the southern Kuh-e Hossein foothills, where we are able to distinguish various types of burial remains, some of which probably organized into cemeteries and/or necropoleis. This rocky environment also offers a wealth of other archaeological features like numerous ancient quarries which were widely reused to carve rock-cut niches and cists (i.e. funeral pits). The quarry and funerary/ritual landscapes are closely interconnected in such a way that the south part of Kuh-e Hossein offers eloquent evidence of the important and evolving symbolic value of the mountain, often connected to the divine power for Zoroastrians. For the future, we are convinced that careful and intensive fieldwork focusing on the reliefs could help us to tackle some of the challenging archaeological questions remaining unanswered in the Fārs Province, and particularly how funerary customs evolved through the ages, an aspect on which we still have a lot to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Naples is a city run by miracles. Canonical miracles like the thrice-annual liquefaction of San Gennaro's blood, and vernacular miracles, like those effected by the capozzelle, anonymous skulls venerated at Fontanelle, the largest ossuary in Europe. Devotees visited these "little skulls" at the cemetery, cleaned them, adopted them into their families, even had them rebaptized. In return for these favors, the anime pezzentelle (vagabond souls) conjured by the skulls were expected to be conduits for divine favors or to provide more concrete benefits, like revealing winning lotto numbers in dreams. In the wake of Vatican II reforms, the Neapolitan archbishop denounced the anime pezzentelle cult as fetishism, and ordered the closure of Fontanelle, along with public access to the last two churches which still housed capozzelle. Based on field research in 1999, 2002, 2006, and 2013,1 have documented the contest between the official church and partisans of the vernacular cult over the stewardship of the capozzelle, as well as the significance of this struggle for the practice of vernacular religion in Naples. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The subject of this study was osteological material, namely the long bones of upper extremities, from St. Peter's church ossuary near Vaihingen an der Enz, dating back to the 13th-14th century. Our aim was to anthropometrically process these skeletal remains found in the ossuary to observe enthesopathies, cortical defects, and other traumatic lesions, as well as to evaluate markers of physical stress and to deduce the work activities of these individuals based on observations. Sex was determined by humeri only, based on the measured perimeters of heads, maximum lengths and discriminatory equations. The occurrence of enthesopathies was relatively high, the highest prevalence being at the lateral epicondyle of the humeri (right 34.04 %; left 34.83 %), indicating an overloading of the muscles in strenuous physical activity. Based on the findings, one can assume that these analysed members of the population devoted their lives to strenuous physical activity, most likely agricultural activities, manual stone crafting and fishing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The baptistery of Brioude is today a unique monument in Auvergne. It was associated with the sanctuary housing the relics of Saint Julien, which dates to the early Middle Ages. During its period of use, the baptistery provided for intra muros burial. This is a unique occurrence in Merovingian Gaul. Two phases of funerary use could be identified from the regularity with which the remains had been treated. The first, dating from the 6th century AD, is contemporary with the use of the baptistery. The second dates from the middle of Merovingian period (from the 7th century A.D.) and is associated with the building of a new structure on the site of the baptistery. This structure was accompanied by burials placed directly over those of the previous phase. The analysis of spatial relationships among burials enabled us to identify a transitional stage between these two phases. This stage was identified on the basis of the disturbance of several burials belonging to the first phase, subsequent to the construction of the structure of the second phase. These disturbances led to the displacement of partial destruction of some sarcophagi and the inclusion of some disturbed skeletal remains in ossuaries. Three ossuaries have been discovered under the floor of the baptistery. The identification of osteological relations of the second order among these different groups demonstrates that, first, the three ossuaries resulted from a single action and, second, the distribution of skeletal elements was not random but that selection and sorting of adult bones had been carried out according to their anatomical type (long bones, cranium, small and middle-sized bones), and these had been separated into three different deposits. Furthermore, we noted that paired immature skeletal elements were divided between two ossuaries. Finally, the age assessment of these young individuals classified them into the 5-9 age category, a group that was absent from the rest of the burial area. These results lead us to hypothesize that there had once been a burial area reserved for this part of the population. This area seems to have been destroyed during the construction of the second phase structure.

The article discusses archaeological excavations that uncovered the rotunda of a medieval building in Piaţa Huet (Huet Square) in Sibiu (Hermannstadt), Romania. The author outlines both the administrative and scientific aspects of this research project and offers planimetric and stratigraphic assessments of the age and original purpose of the structure. He also offers chronological and typological comparisons with similar buildings elsewhere in Central and Eastern Europe, concluding that the structure dates to the 12th century and served as a church building.

ABSTRACT The serendipity of discovery can determine the process and progress of the archaeological interpretation of religious belief and ritual practice. The Chalcolithic period (4500-3600 B.C.E.) of the southern Levant is used as a case study. Had the material expressions of Chalcolithic religion been discovered in a different sequence, our understanding of that religion might have been distinctly altered. We first present a chronological narrative of discovery, with summary headlines, and then proceed to dismantle previous syntheses. Finally, we construct our own framework for understanding Chalcolithic religion, which is essentially a life-cycle religion with extensive, almost ever-present, ritual reference to death and the regeneration of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay considers the awkward 'life of the corpse' outside of the official spaces of the designated cemetery or burial ground in post-apartheid South Africa. We reflect on a new memorial building in Cape Town, an Ossuary named the New Prestwich Memorial. The memorial was built following a city-wide dispute over the 'accidental discovery' of the bones of thousands of people who were buried in Prestwich Street, close to Cape Town's harbour, but whose presence had been forgotten and concealed by colonial urban development. This essay considers the New Prestwich Memorial Building as an object of public culture. It emerges out of our own deliberate attempt to engage with the Ossuary as an object in history - incomplete, troubling and under construction. Mindful of the debates and texts written about the dispute circulating in Cape Town, we visited both the site of the 'discovery' of the bones in Prestwich Street and the Ossuary. We noted the elements in the visual landscape that alerted us to the work being done by this combination of material substances and design. Our essay is organised around six key terms or phrases that occur in the exhibition text, which guide the visitor's interpretation of the space. These words and phrases appeared to us to mark moments of intense symbolisation, signifiers in which the ideological work of the architect and the authors of the exhibition became most visible. The terms are: Gateway; Engraved Palimpsest; Mirrors; Visitors' Book; Concrete, Brick, Stone; and Closed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]