The Archaeology of Death

The Archaeology of Death

David Gibbins

Computer-generated illustration by Stephen Player of Poulton Chapel, based on the drawing opposite from a 17th century map, shortly before the chapel became derelict. The landscape is fanciful, but draws inspiration from the 15th century Book of Hours of Jean, Duc de Berry, and shows typical Cistercian farming activities, with arable in the foreground and sheep on the hillside. The illustration also depicts a recorded incident in 1400, when one 'Ieuan Gogh was indicted for lying in wait near the Chapel with the intent to cause bodily harm on a Thomas Quythod.' (Stephen Player has since illustrated over 100 books, including Terry Pratchett novels).

In my novel Crusader Gold there are two murders in religious houses in Britain – one in the medieval period, seven hundred years ago, another in the present day. As it happens, I have been involved in the excavation of a medieval chapel in England, at Poulton in Cheshire, where just such an event may have taken place – an episode imaginatively reconstructed by the artist Stephen Player on the cover of our monograph arising from the project, reproduced above.

I first visited Poulton in early 1995 with fellow archaeologists Mike Emery and Keith Matthews, when we were seeking a multi-period rural site that would also be suitable for training the students I taught at the University of Liverpool. We knew from old maps that there had once been a chapel at Poulton, associated with a lost Cistercian monastery near the river Dee. We could almost have written the history of the site from the finds we collected that day –prehistoric flints, Roman pottery, medieval rooftile, human bone. For several summers after that we directed the first large-scale project of this nature in the north-west of England.

The term ‘palimpsest’ is often used for archaeological sites, referring to a manuscript page which has been written on, scraped off and reused, often many times. That is what our excavation revealed, often in barely discernible traces –ditches where masonry had once been, pits which had once been post-holes. Objects separated by thousands of years had been churned up together in the ploughsoil, and little from the past was undisturbed: old buildings had been swept away to make way for new ones, old burials had been dug through to put in fresh ones. We called our monograph report The Archaeology of an Eccesiastical Landscape, yet the landscape controlled by the Cistercians lay over an extraordinary depth of history, a landscape shaped by people as far back as the end of the Ice Age. It was a site that demanded all our combined experience, as well as a large team of specialists – church historians, experts in maps and medieval documents, pottery experts, osteologists.

Poulton made me reflect on what archaeology can tell us, at a time when I was, as I continue to be, most concerned with the excavation of shipwrecks; I have always tried to maintain some involvement with archeology on land for this reason, preceding Poulton with land excavations at Carthage in Tunisia in the early 1990s, and following it with my long-term investigation of a prehistoric site in Canada, which you can read about by clicking here.

As an undergraduate at the University of Bristol I had been greatly influenced by Professor Peter Warren, excavator of Knossos in Crete, and in my final year I had specialized in the Bronze Age Aegean to be taught by him. He made us read Fernand Braudel’s great work The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, and I left Bristol with the words ‘underlying continuity’ ringing in my head. Braudel tried to show how history can be seen in superimposed layers, from the ‘events’ of political history to the underlying continuity of day-to-day life – la longue durée - and how the former may have only limited influence on the latter. Afterwards at Cambridge I applied this model to my research on Roman maritime economics, as it became clear that some patterns of trade reflected in shipwreck cargoes, for instance, were not necessarily impacted by the ‘events’ - such as changes in emperor - which tend to describe traditional history for us.

I found myself thinking again about underlying continuity at Poulton. We had uncovered evidence for successive reorderings of the landscape, and dramatic changes as the ‘events’ of history swept over the area: prehistoric occupation replaced by Roman structures, Roman structures swept away and replaced by the Cistercian landscape, further reordering after the 16th century Dissolution of the Monasteries. Yet there was also a fascinating thread of continuity, something we guessed at when we first visited the site. Early churches were often built on pagan sites of worship. Were we looking at a medieval chapel on the site of a very early church, perhaps even a late Roman temple, which itself was on a prehistoric ritual site – and perhaps a burial site – stretching back thousands of years? All of the evidence from Poulton seems to bear out this picture. With each change, much that had gone before would have survived, just in a different guise.

The greatest evidence for underlying continuity surely lies in the people themselves, and here we were staring at them face to face. I had excavated human remains before – at Carthage, our dig near the harbour entrance revealed the macabre remains of bodies we believe were Spanish soldiers, perhaps victims of plague during a 16th century siege. But Poulton was the first time I had been involved in the excavation of human remains in such numbers, dozens of skeletons from a cemetery probably in use from at least the 12th to the 16th century AD. The skeletons attracted a great deal of interest, and drew the media and countless visitors to the site. More and more burials were excavated, some essential to uncover the chapel and other structures, and their remains were boxed and taken to the laboratory for osteological analysis. The excavation and study of these remains became all-consuming, a far greater part of the project than we had originally envisaged.

I found myself viewing these remains with surprising disquiet. As an archaeologist in the ‘Old World’, I was not trained to have the heightened sensitivity toward human remains common in North America, for example, where native burials are often left alone, and where death and burial in general are a less visible part of day-to-day life. In Britain, cemeteries often have a crowded history, and burials are ephemeral by necessity. If you look hard enough in any old churchyard still in use you can find bone fragments where fresh burials have been dug through existing ones, some only a few generations old. At Poulton, we were by no means the first to disturb old burials – for every intact skeleton or poignant family group we uncovered there were countless bone fragments, dug up to make way for further shallow burials in the rock-hard ground. The bones dug up in the past were scattered or dumped, not reverently reburied, though they did remain in the same location, in the landscape where those people had lived and died.

There are of course many instances where the excavation of human remains can be justified on scientific or historical grounds, and not just finds from the distant past. In 2004, I stood at the graves of three members of Sir John Franklin’s doomed expedition of 1845-6 on the desolate shore of Beechey Island in the Canadian Arctic, and photographed the scatter of rusting cans all round with their thick rims of lead solder. Exhumation and autopsy of the frozen bodies in the 1980s confirmed what many had suspected, that the level of lead toxicity was dangerously high, enough to debilitate men already weakened by illness and malnutrition. In this case, the findings may point to a darker truth, one of profound implications not only for our understanding of the fatal flaw in the Franklin expedition – it may suggest that the Dickensian cusp of insanity in Victorian England was not just a result of desperate living conditions for many, but also a consequence of widespread lead poisoning.

Yet there must always be an extra edge of justification for large-scale cemetery excavation, whatever the period - particularly where there is no alterior need, for example to clear a building site or a crypt, or to reveal crucial evidence underneath: in a nutshell, we need to predict whether the forensic evidence is likely to reveal a great deal more than we could guess at already. Unlike many pre-Christian burials, there were hardly any ‘grave goods’ at Poulton, most bodies having been buried simply in a shroud with no personal belongings. As a result, most of the burials were impossible to date within our timeframe of almost five centuries. Cause of death is usually impossible to ascertain from skeletal remains alone, and the osteological analysis did not, in general, allow us to be any more certain how people died, adding little to broad observations - plague, for example, may be revealed in the burial together of whole families, and high rates of child mortality may reveal the usual suspect illnesses. Long life was possible for those who survived childhood, and there was evidence for a healthy diet in the medieval English countryside, certainly by comparison with early Victorian slum dwellers and the sailors of Franklin’s expedition. On the whole our study suggested a fairly standard rural population of the medieval period, itself a valuable conclusion and a significant result for the investigation at Poulton.

Archaeology and death would seem to go hand-in-hand, yet there are plenty of circumstances, including events associated with sudden death, where bodies are rarely found – ancient shipwrecks, for example. Only the most clinical archaeologist facing human remains can fail to be moved, to feel some empathy for that moment of huge emotion when that body still had meaning for someone; to have these feelings requires no special spiritual or religious belief, and that empathy, not scientific dispassion, is the gift of those who can truly bring the past alive. My own disquiet goes back to our first interest at Poulton in studying the human imprint on this landscape, and to underlying continuity. I felt a similar unease when I watched the bodies of American soldiers of the War of 1812, excavated from a battle site in Canada, repatriated and buried in Bath National Cemetery in New York State. I have always felt powerfully moved by British and Commonwealth war graves, small cemeteries of men buried near where they fell, places in the landscape most intimately associated with those lives and deaths. After analysis, the medieval bones from Poulton were reburied at Mount St Bernard Abbey in Leicestershire, the last remaining Cistercian monastery in England. But I wonder whether those people of medieval Poulton would have felt most affinity with the Cistercians, or with the landscape where they were first buried, where they lived their lives and where their ancestors had found spiritual comfort, long before Christianity arrived. Should we have left them be?

A rendering by Alan Gibbins of a small metal pendant, probably 14th century, with an enamel inlay motif which appears to be a moth or butterfly; a rendering of the original as it was found is to the right. The pendant was excavated at Poulton in 1996, and may have been worn on the bridle of a horse as in this painting of Lady Godiva, by John Collier (1850-1934). Poulton has other knightly connections: the Arthurian story of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, probably written in the 14th century and set partly in Cheshire, has Gawain crossing the river Dee at the 'Holy Head', perhaps Poulton. For the Arthurian connections in my novel Crusader Gold, click here.

Publications

Emery, M.M., Gibbins, D.J.L. and Matthews, K.J. 1996. The Archaeology of an Ecclesiastical Landscape. Chapel House Farm, Poulton (Cheshire), 1995. Chester Archaeology Excavation and Survey Report 9. Chester City Council/University of Liverpool.

Emery, M., Gibbins, D. and Matthews, K. 1997. Poulton Chapel, Cheshire, 1995-6: Mesolithic to Medieval occupation in the upper Dee Valley. Archaeology North West 11: 120-26.

Illustrations

The four pages of illuminated vellum manuscript, never previously published, come from a miniature Book of Hours written in Latin in the 15th century. Books of Hours such as this, containing psalms, prayers and devotional texts, were used by lay people who wished to observe some of the liturgy of the monasteries, and would undoubtedly have been present at Poulton at this date. The other pictures are a close-up of the chapel from a 17th century map; two images from Beechey Island, in the Canadian Arctic, one of the 1846 Franklin expedition graves, the other of lead-soldered cans left from the expedition; the Commonwealth War Cemetery at Haifa, Israel; and the cover of the Poulton monograph.

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