The mystery behind several "vampire" burials in Poland has been solved.
People who were buried with sickles (curved, sharp farming knives) around their necks, or rocks at their jaws, to prevent their corpses from reanimating were natives to the area in which they were buried, according to a new study.
Tales of the dead coming back to
life have truly ancient roots, going back to the ancient Egyptians,
Greeks, Babylonians and beyond, said study co-author Tracy Betsinger, a
bioarchaeologist at the State University of New York at Oneonta.
For all these stories of
the dead coming back to life, "the word collectively used is a
'revenance,'" Betsinger told Live Science.
Gregoricka and her colleagues
analyzed bone fragments from the Drawsko cemetery, a Polish site where
vampire burials were found. The cemetery dates from the 17th to the 18th
century, the researchers said. Some people at the site were buried with
sickles under their necks or rocks under their jaws, to prevent them
from reanimating. (The sickles were intended to decapitate the people if
they tried to rise from the grave, while the rocks pinned their jaws
shut so they weren't able to feed on the living, Gregoricka said.)
The researchers then took a closer look at 60 of the 333 burials from the site, six of which were "vampire" burials intended
to prevent a corpse from reanimating. The team analyzed the ratio of
strontium isotopes (versions of the atom with different numbers of
neutrons) in the skeletons. Because each location has a unique ratio of
these isotopes, and people's bodies naturally take the elements up from
the environment, analyzing strontium isotope ratios can reveal where a
person is from.
Contrary to the initial
hypothesis that the "vampires" were immigrants, the team actually
discovered that all of the vampires were locals.(Source: http://www.nbcnews.com)
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