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17th c. gallows yields bone pits, revenant and suicide burials
An excavation of a 17th century gallows near Quedlinburg, central Germany, has uncovered 16 individual graves, including a revenant burial and a rare coffin inhumation, and two bone pits containing mixed limbs and bones collected from previous burials.
From historical sources we know there was a gallows at the site from 1662 that was used for executions until 1809. The executed were often buried at the gallows hill because nobody wanted to bother hefting the criminal dead somewhere else for burial. Archaeologist with the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology (LDA) Saxony-Anhalt have been excavating the site for three seasons to learn more about penal and funerary practices for condemned individuals in the early modern period.
Some of the bones show evidence of sharp force trauma, probably inflicted during torture before the execution. All but one of the individual burials were interred directly into the ground, their positions indicating their hands were still bound when they unceremonious dumped into holes in the ground.
One of them was a man with large stones placed on his chest. This was likely a revenant burial; his body was pressed with heavy weights to keep him from rising from the grave to plague the living. People who died suddenly or violently, were considered dangerous because they died without absolution, and someone who had been hanged from the neck until dead for his crimes would surely have had been a threatening figure in death as in life, and with some very big scores to settle. There is no evidence on his bones of how he died, however. Hanging doesn’t leave any visible marks.
The only burial to not receive the dumped-into-a-hole treatment was someone buried in a wooden coffin, a rare find at execution sites. The deceased was on their back with their hands folded over their stomach. Three amber beads found in the grave indicate they were buried with a rosary. The care taken with this burial suggests it may have been someone who took their own life rather than someone condemned to the gallows. Suicides were denied burial in consecrated ground.
The two bone pits, first discovered in 2023, are being investigated further this season. Body parts from people tortured — perhaps broken on the wheel or quartered — were thrown into the charnel pit still wrapped in bandages, as well as disarticulated bones collected by executioners and their assistants in regular cleanups of the gallows hill. The bones were stacked in several layers, on top of each other and next to each other. Fragments of clothing, buttons, buckles, and ceramics were also in the bone pits.
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