Heads chopped off, body parts weighed down with stones, a hole in the stomach: even in ancient times, people tried to protect themselves from the undead. Where does the fear come from?
Something was wrong with one of the dead. In the east of Sagalassos, southwest of Antalya in Turkey, archaeologists led by Johan Claeys from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven recently excavated a burial ground where people buried their dead between about 330 BC and about 470 AD – in very different ways. The excavators found places for urns and coffins, they came across a family grave with seven or more dead from the first century AD and a brick grave monument from Hellenistic times. But a grave was different.