What exactly happened at the stake can no longer be said today. Presumably the people gathered around their dead one last time. Possibly they raised their cups once more in farewell; perhaps they also let the dead man’s clay drinking vessel rotate around, everyone drank from it, and the last one threw it into the fire.
But at some point everyone just walked away. No one cared about what was left after the fire: no one dug a pit, put the bones and ashes in an urn, or at least covered it with earth. Instead, the bones and the charred remains of the grave goods were left lying there. Then one day, usually years later, others came to lay a new pyre.
Apparently, people buried their dead at the Salurner Klause in South Tyrol about 3000 years ago, over two centuries, in this way, which seems almost careless. That researchers around the anthropologist Federica Crivellaro from Stony Brook University in New York now report in the journal Plos One. And with that, they write, they had discovered something extraordinary: namely, a burial rite from prehistoric times that was new to Central Europe and not previously known.
The Romans sometimes tended to burial, sometimes to cremation
The fact that there was a cremation ground near Salurn is not particularly special. Such places are rarely found, because pyres usually leave no permanent traces. But there must have been many. From the second millennium BC and into Christian times, cremation of the dead was widespread in Central Europe. It was so common that the period from 1300 to 800 BC is now referred to as the “urnfield period” after the burial sites of the time, and the culture that was dominant in Europe at the time as the “urnfield culture”.
Reconstruction of one of the cups apparently thrown into the fire at burials.
(Photo: Günther Niederwanger/Ufficio Beni Archeologici di Bolzano)
The Romans later tended to burial, sometimes to cremation; The latter had the advantage, especially in cramped Rome, which was growing rapidly, that an urn took up less space and the necropolis did not grow excessively as a result. And elsewhere dead people ended up in the fire. In the Homeric epics, for example, the corpses of fallen heroes are cremated when they are not being desecrated. In the end, Achilles and his beloved Patroclus do not share a coffin or a shroud, but a golden urn. And the Iliad ends with Hector’s cremation: the Trojans lay their dead hero weeping on a pyre, and at the end they quench the flames with wine.
But that’s not all: the Trojans don’t leave their hero’s remains of bones lying around. They collect them, put them in a golden box and then lower it down into a tomb. The majority of ancient cremations are less representative of the state, and there were regional differences. The bodies were often cremated in certain specially designated places, the Ustrines. Sometimes the so-called cremation was packed in boxes, sometimes in urns, sometimes it ended up unpacked in a pit.
Sometimes the dead were simply cremated directly in a pit or on a stand over a pit; the Romans called this practice “bustum”. But whether in Rome, in Troy or in the Alps, the end was always similar: the mortal remains of the cremated were cleared away in one way or another. And if only that a pit was filled up.
But at that place near Salorn nothing of the sort happened. Archaeologists excavated the cremation site there back in the 1980s: they discovered a plateau with a diameter of around six meters, covered by a layer of earth containing a lot of carbon, in which the excavators found objects made of bronze and horn, glass beads and pieces of pottery, which they attributed to the time dated between 1150 and 950 BC.
Above all, however, they found huge amounts of bone remains, a total of more than 63 kilograms. At no other cremation site in Europe have so many cremations been found, says Federica Crivellaro, the first author of the study. Instead, archaeologists discovered burial grounds with urns near other cremation sites, such as near Frattesina north of Ferrara. The excavators found no such burial place at Salurn. Rather, almost all of the bone fragments lay in a central area on the plateau – i.e. where the pyres once stood.
Apparently the cremation was left to itself until the next burial
The team led by Crivellaro now started to puzzle. From the sheer mass of bone fragments, the scientists calculated that at least 48 people must have been cremated at Salurn. Coincidentally or not, they independently identified the recovered potsherds as the relics of at least 48 beakers. From individual bone fragments, the researchers conclude that adults as well as children and adolescents were among those burned; the sex of the dead can no longer be determined. And the proportion of skull fragments, among other things, suggests that the cremation was left unchanged on site – and not selected bones, the largest bones or the skull, for example, were removed and buried separately.
The scientists conclude from all of this: Apparently a wealthy family in view of the rich grave goods cremated their deceased for generations and then left the cremation to itself until the next burial. This rite would be new: archaeologists have never encountered anything like it before.
Or was everything different? Perhaps an accident had wiped out a rich family, all of whom were cremated together within a short time, in a kind of collective bustum? Then there would have been a dramatic burial, but it is quite possible that people would have covered the cremation ground with earth after all. But that can be ruled out, says Federica Crivellaro. In the case of a mass incineration, the incineration site should have been significantly larger. The ash, bone and wood remains were not all mixed up on one level, but in layers on top of each other.
And the bones and grave goods are extremely fragmented, says the scientist. This could also be explained by erosion in the soil. But it could also be an indication that people came back a long time after the cremation to build a new pyre. And trampled over the ashes, remains of bones and grave goods of those previously burned.