What is a mass grave?
A mass grave is a burial (but not always in the earth) containing the remains of multiple (usually 5 or more) deceased individuals.
Mass graves are usually a result of many people dying, or being killed. War, famine, or disease are frequent reasons for such burials.
Often, traditional burial customs– like individual graves or objects buried with the deceased– are not followed, due to the circumstances surrounding the mass grave, in effect a breakdown of the social and religious infrastructure.
In some mass graves, and particularly mass graves that are results of plague or disease, we sometimes see distinct patterns in the organization of bodies. Individuals are often placed alternating head and feet (fig. A) and sometimes layers of individuals alternate directions (fig. B).
WHY STUDY MASS GRAVES?
In the context of the Justinianic Plague, mass graves can tell us a significant amount about disease and demographics, specifically the effect of disease on cultures and populations.
These mortality crises have the power to, in some cases, drastically change the layout of systems in an empire, for better or for worse for the survivors. As a result, studying mass graves not only can give us hard evidence for these changes, but they can, in turn, help us understand how mortality crises influence social and cultural changes. Perhaps most importantly,
studying mass graves gives us a window into the lives of individuals who are routinely not attested in written records: poor people, women, children, and individuals living on the outskirts of an empire.
ISSUES WITH STUDYING MASS GRAVES
Like any aspect of archaeology, though identifying and excavating mass graves might seem straightforward, it’s actually far more difficult.
Mortality crises often have very similar burial practices as periods of low crisis: sometimes it’s hard to distinguish people buried because of disease versus normal cycles of death, especially in the beginning and later periods of disease outbreak, where the amount of deceased individuals might be significantly lower and less frequent.
Sometimes, mass graves stay open and uncovered for months at a time, and tombs are used over the span of generations, so archaeologists must be especially careful in how they excavate so they don’t confuse multiple depositions of individuals as a single deposition of individuals, or bodies in tombs of long term use as contemporaneously deposited.
Sometimes, archaeologists might see a concentration of bones and think they have a mass grave when they actually have an ossuary, a deposition of bones retrieved from graves and accumulated over a long period of time.
Careful excavation of graves is a necessity. Archaeologists look closely at the placement of bones to see if organic material was once there, which indicates that individuals were likely first buried in that place, something archaeologists call “inhumation”. It can sometimes be hard to discern violent and non violent depositions, as tissue, which preserves the majority of violent evidence, is usually no longer there.
- Can you think of a situation in which, if you were an archaeologist, you might confuse a mass grave with something else?
- If you were an archaeologist, what are some features you’d be looking for if you thought you found a mass grave?
- Do you think studying mass graves is important?
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Plague Paths: The Archaeology of the Justinianic Plague Online 