Random Historical Moments

The English - are different

Priorities firmly in the right place:

"Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed two skeletons thought to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old, locked in an embrace.

The pair from the Neolithic period were discovered outside Mantua, about 40km (25 miles) south of Verona. The pair, almost certainly a man and a woman, are thought to have died young as their teeth were mostly intact, said chief archaeologist Elena Menotti."

"The discovery last month of a warrior buried with his horse in an Anglo-Saxon cemetery at a US air base in Suffolk, which received wide publicity in the national press, has touched a nerve of public disquiet about the disinterment of the dead for archaeological research.

Writing to The Times, Elizabeth Dineley of Shaftesbury said it was ‘immeasurably touching’ to see a published photograph of the warrior and his horse, but that ‘to rend them apart’ in the name of science amounted to vandalism. ‘How short a time do we have to be buried, ’ she asked, ‘before it is permissible, even acceptable, for grinning archaeologists to dig out our bones, prod about among our teeth, disperse our possessions, take the head off our horse and lay us, not to rest, in boxes in museums?’

In the same newspaper, His Honour Judge Gabriel Hutton, of Dursley, Gloucestershire, wrote that if he intended to be buried with his horse, he would be ‘saddened’ to think that they might both be exhumed at some time in the future, to make way for a new dormitory at a US air base. ‘When does sanctity, afforded to graves, run out?’

In another letter to The Times last month, Anthony Maynard of the Sedgeford Historical and Archaeological Research Project in Norfolk announced that his group had also excavated an East Anglian horse burial amid Anglo-Saxon skeletons this year. ‘We do, though, have our sensitivities, and intend ultimately to re-inter the skeletons at the site and erect a suitable memorial, ’ he wrote."

There's a picture of the warrior and his horse here.

posted by Brituncula @ 1:44 PM