Awaiting Kingdom Come With Drainpipe

One of my favourite Danes, Henrik Karll, offers this variation on an emblematic archaeological motif: a grinning skeleton looking up at the sky from a trench. Only this one's accompanied by a 1950s drain pipe that's sliced it lengthwise in half. As detailed on Henrik's blog, he had a snowy watching brief for some small-scale trenching at Holstebro church in western Jutland a few weeks ago. This is one of the dead people he ran into: dating from after the erection of the church c. AD 1100 but before the advent of careful churchyard planning c. AD 1900. It's an adult individual, sex unknown.

Generation after generation we keep producing these bone-filled pits in the ground. Few other animals do. When an elk dies its bones are left on the ground surface to be gnawed away by rodents. Us humans, unless we're cremated, are placed in the Earth's embrace, waiting for the arrival of the archaeologist.

Update 7 March: Says Claes Pettersson:

"Digging in Trondheim back at the dawn of time I worked at the St. Olav churchyard. It had diminished in size and partly been covered with buildings, probably due to Late Medieval population contraction in the town. As a result, house foundations and graves were mixed indiscriminately in one fine mess.

In one of the graves was a man with his hands on his pelvis. A standard burial -- except that this gigantic corner post for a house had been planted straight through the body. A bull's eye hit: the pelvis was intact, as were the slightly flexed arms, but otherwise everything was gone all the way up to the neck. Visually, he seemed to hug the post. As you can imagine, we called him 'the vampire'. Makes you wonder what kind of crime it takes for people to impale you on a 50 cm pine tree..."

[More blog entries about archaeology, Denmark; arkeologi, Danmark.]