Thousands Buried Beneath Philly Playground

This week, a team of archaeologists broke the asphalt in four places at Weccecoe Park, digging to a depth of 3 feet to uncover evidence of the 19th century burial site. On Thursday morning, the fourth and final trench revealed a single gravestone.

"Amelia Brown, 1819, Aged 26 years" is clearly carved into the white stone, with this epitaph:

"Whosoever live and believeth in me, though we be dead, yet shall we live."

"There is no grave shaft associated with that stone, it’s just sitting loose in the fill," said Douglas Mooney, senior archaeologist for URS corporation. “It was knocked over at some point, long ago, when the cemetery was filled in in the mid-19th century. It no longer marks an actual grave. It’s just a loose stone in the ground." Read more.

2,000-Year Old Pyramid and Multiple Pre-Columbian Burial Sites Found in Veracruz, Mexico

The National Anthropology and History Institute, or INAH, announced the discovery of 30 pre-Columbian burials and a pyramid in an ancient settlement in eastern Mexico that could be up to 2,000 years old.

The graves located in the municipality of Jaltipan, Veracruz state, were accompanied by offerings, animal remains and fossils.

Also found was a brick structure with characteristics similar to one at the Mayan site of Comalcalco in Tabasco, INAH said in a communique.

Preliminary hypotheses indicate it could have been a sanctuary where people of the region buried their dead, or perhaps a kind of market or a center of government where different cultures merged. Its use could date back to 700 A.D. Read more.

Ancient burial site unearthed in El Salvador

A recent archaeological finding in El Salvador, which included six complete pots from the late Classic period and human remains next to two vessels placed as a ritualistic offering and apparently at least 1,200-years-old, has thrown light on ancient Mayan settlements in the region.

In an interview, the director of Archaeology at the Salvadoran National Cultural Heritage Office, Shione Shibata, said that the discovery in western Nuevo Lourdes, in Colon, about 20km from San Salvador, was historically important because the distribution of the remains indicated they formed part of a village.

The finding was first reported by workers at a residential compound construction site who were digging a ditch to lay down water piping and came across pieces of broken pottery and obsidian shards. Read more.

Separated and Reunited in Death

These grave markers — pressed up against either side of an imposing wall, with a pair of clasped hands reaching over the wall’s top — date to a time in Dutch history when Catholic and Protestant graves were strictly segregated. A Catholic and a Protestant married couple, separated in death, arranged for this unique workaround in order to rejoin one another.

In 1842, a colonel in the Dutch cavalry, JWC van Gorkum, married a woman known as JCPH van Aefferden. The union was controversial — van Gorkum was Protestant and van Aefferden was Catholic. Despite the prevailing culture at the time, the two remained married for decades, only separating when van Gorkum died in 1880.

But when van Aefferden passed away eight years later, she couldn’t be buried with her late husband; even in death, Catholics needed to stay with their own. While alive, she made her wishes clear — she did not want to be buried in her family tomb and, instead, wished to be as close to her husband as possible. The solution, seen above, is their connected tombstones.

The Merry Cemetery

In Săpânţa, Romania, there lies a very different kind of cemetery. Rather than the usual dark and ominous crypts and tombstones reminding us of our eventual demise, the Merry Cemetery chooses to remember the past lives of its residents with brightly painted tombstones and even more colorful stories about the people themselves.

The idea for the unusual crosses was started by 14 year old town resident Stan Ioan Pătraşe. By 1935, Pătraş began carving clever verse and ironic poems about the deceased, as well as painting the crosses with the deceased’s image, often depicting their manner of death.

Over 600 beautifully carved wooden crosses display the life stories, personal descriptions and final moments of almost everyone who has died in the town of Săpânţa. The illustrations show everything from soldiers being shot and beheaded to a poor soul being struck by a car.

The epitaphs reveal surprising truths and a fair amount of good humor. For example one cross reads, “Underneath this heavy cross. Lies my mother in law… Try not to wake her up. For if she comes back home. She’ll bite my head off.”

Ancient Animal Mummies

Wrapped in linen and carefully laid to rest, animal mummies hold intriguing clues to life and death in ancient Egypt. One hundred years ago, the many thousands of mummified animals that turned up at sacred burial sites throughout Egypt were just things to be cleared away to get at the good stuff. Few people studied them, and their importance was generally unrecognized.

In the century since then, archaeology has become less of a trophy hunt and more of a science. Excavators now realize that much of their sites’ wealth lies in the multitude of details about ordinary folks—what they did, what they thought, how they prayed. Animal mummies are a big part of that.

Ancient Baby Graveyard Not for Child Sacrifice, Scientists Say

A Carthaginian burial site was not for child sacrifice but was instead a graveyard for babies and fetuses, researchers now say.

A new study of the ancient North African site offers the latest volley in a debate over the primary purpose of the graveyard, long thought to be a place of sacred sacrifice.

“It’s all very great, cinematic stuff, but whether that was a constant daily activity ― I think our analysis contradicts that,” said study co-author Jeffrey Schwartz of the University of Pittsburgh.

The city-state of Carthage was founded in the ninth century B.C., when Queen Dido fled Phoenicia (along the eastern Mediterranean shore) for what is now Tunis, Tunisia. The empire became a powerhouse of the ancient world and fought several wars against the Romans. Read more.

SIB will fight to protect 4,000-year-old burial site

The Sechelt Nation will fight to save an ancient chieftain burial site found at the mouth of Salmon Inlet, described as one of the most important archeological discoveries in the province.

“We’ve proven without a shadow of a doubt this site is one of the most important in British Columbia — one of the most important for showing the development of chiefly status, and it’s right here,” Dr. Terence Clark of the Canadian Museum of Civilization said during Archeology Day at the Sechelt Indian Band (SIB) hall July 29.

He said archeologists have worked in the area every summer for the past three years through a partnership with the Sechelt Indian Band (SIB), the museum and the University of Toronto. Each year new burials and artifacts are found that point to the significance of the site. Read more.

Megalithic burial site, also a place of worship, unearthed

PUNE: Researchers from the city-based Deccan College Post-Graduate and Research Institute recently unearthed four megalithic burials at Hirapur in Chandrapur district, which, the researchers say, were used for more than just burying the dead.

Material evidences unearthed at the excavation sites testify that these burials or ‘megaliths’, dating between the 3rd and the 2nd century BC, were also worshipped by the local rural communities, and guarded with Laterite protection walls. Archaeologists said this is perhaps the first time that a megalithic structure has been found to have been worshipped. Archaeologists said the megaliths might have been erected and protected during the Asmaka Janapada or in the Satavahana periods.

Archaeologists have termed the four non-sepulchral megaliths as unique burial-cum-temple architectural structures, discovered for the first time in the South Asian megalithic culture. Read more.