In Recent News: 150 Roman Graves Under a Garage in Kent

Image source and original news article

In looking for Archaeology of Death news, I ran across this story about a recent find in Canterbury, UK. In short, while digging up an old garage in order to develop a housing area, workers uncovered approximately a hundred adult and child burials on the outskirts of what was once a Roman settlement. Archaeologists believe that the graves, since they are east-west facing, must be Christian.

Archaeologist Paul Bennett describes the complexity of the site, where there are layers upon layers of human structures since the burials were placed.

"There are lots of modern foundations here but lots of the old buildings have also survived. It is a very complex site, with foundations cutting pits which are cutting graves."

In my opinion, the complications and issues that the archaeologists, as well as the land developers, working at this site are facing provides an excellent manifestation of a lot of the concepts that we have approached in class (specifically in week 12: March 22-25). What was meant to be a fairly routine project of demolishing an old building to make way for housing development was temporarily halted by the discovery.

Archaeologists at this site were faced with a time frame of only a few days in which they had to excavate and safely lift a hundred graves from the ground. Furthermore, after this time period the area will be redeveloped for housing and it will be impossible to make any more observations of the original graves and the placement of the bodies in them.

I think that instances like this one are particularly interesting because they speak to our relationship with the dead. In this case, the discovery of graves was enough to completely halt the building project for a few days, but after that it was back to business as usual. This fits in well with something I've been thinking about lately regarding the treatment of the dead by modern western and westernized cultures and that is that our relationship with the dead is mostly one sided. I think we relate to the dead for our own purposes (eg. remembrance of happy memories of deceased family members, reverence of deceased celebrities, or knowledge of past peoples), but in most instances do not consider the dead active and conscious participants in this relationship. In the case of the burials at Canterbury their value is in their contribution to the knowledge base regarding Roman occupation in England, but beyond that our needs (to build houses) supercede theirs (to stay put in their graves). I'm not saying that I agree or disagree with this position, I'm just saying that in my opinion this seems to be a commonly held attitude.

Also, popular film has taught us that removing graves prior to housing development is the best way to avoid this.

*Click images for news articles cited and original photo sources.