Archaeologists from the State Museum of Prehistory of Saxony-Anhalt continue to work in the village of Oppin, Germany, in excavations carried out in the northern district of Saale before construction work begins on an electrical current line running from Wolmirstedt (Saxony -Anhalt) to Landshut (Bavaria).
During the work, an “extremely interesting” burial was discovered of a man between 40 and 60 years old who was lying crouched on his left side, looking east and with his head facing north. Although no assets were found, the position of the deceased indicates that the tomb was built at the end of the Neolithic, within the framework of the Bell Beaker culture.
The surprise for the researchers was finding a large rock 100 centimeters long, 50 wide and 10 high that was lying on the individual’s bent legs. “It must be assumed that the stone was placed there for some reason, possibly to keep the dead person in the tomb and prevent his resurrection,” experts say.
The burial has been described by archaeologists as a “returned” grave, examples of which are popularly referred to as “zombie graves.” Several ancient cultures make reference to people returning from the dead as a spirit or corpse. animated, sometimes to terrify the living.
Tombs of this type have been found spread across various places in Europe. Many of them date back to the Middle Ages, although some examples date back thousands of years. These burials are characterized by still maintaining evidence of the precautions that their contemporaries took to prevent the dead from rising.
Such measures could include, as in this case, large stones placed on the legs of the deceased, bodies pierced with a spear to fix them in the ground, tied with chains or buried face down so that they could not find their way out and could walk again among the alive.
“We know that, already in the Stone Age, people were afraid of ghosts and that’s why they wanted to prevent this with magic,” says Susanne Friederich, archaeologist at the State Office for Heritage Management and Archeology of Saxony-Anhalt and director of the excavation project.
“Back then, people believed that the dead sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves. That’s why the deceased were sometimes placed face down. If the dead person lies face down, they dig deeper and deeper instead of reaching the surface.” , he points out in a statement on Facebook.
Although the burial has not yet been conclusively dated, it appears to be associated with the phenomenon of the Bell Beaker culture, which appeared more than 4,500 years ago in Europe and persisted for several centuries. Researchers have discovered another grave nearby from the same period as well as remains that could be from a home.
This could represent the first return tomb from the Chalcolithic and early Bronze Age period found in central Germany. If this fact is confirmed, the discovery would be extremely unusual, experts say, since there is little evidence of such funerary customs for the Bell Beaker culture.
