I’m watching a recording of Time Team and they’re exploring an unusual promontory on a stretch of the Northumbria coast near St Abbs Head. Right slap bang in the middle of the path they discover a skeleton in a very shallow grave… not shallow by burial but by erosion. Even as they peel the turf back it’s pulling bones up with it. They notified the police and they duly turned up to take statements, but are assured it’s a medieval burial.
Quite some time ago I was working in Wimborne town centre/square involved in converting one large shop in the square into two separate units…
Wimborne has in its centre and only a matter of yards from where I was working a beautiful Old Saxon church with Norman architecture and is famed for its unique chained library and the tombs of King Ethelred, the brother of Alfred the Great, as well as the tombs of John Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and his duchess, the maternal grandparents of King Henry VII of England.
The rest of Wimborne’s architecture is regarded as one of the foremost collections of 15th, 16th and 17th century buildings in Dorset. Local planning regulations now thankfully protect dozens of original 16th, 17th and 18th century fronted shops and pubs which has preserved almost all of the original buildings.


My involvement with the job was to supply and fix all the supporting new steelwork. Other contractors had dug out the floor and dug trenches to pour new concrete footing for the new internal walls and supposedly the footings for the major supports to the new shop front and the two new door openings… supposedly.


They should have told me they weren’t ready as when I turned up they were still digging. Old building like that are very delicate and care must be taken if you don’t want upstairs to suddenly join you downstairs, and to that end the interior of the building was supported on a mass of scaffolding and props. While the contractors were digging I unloaded my steelwork onto the road outside causing a lot of rather unpleasant remarks from passing pedestrians.


Come lunchtime and the workforce had all disappeared up the pub… which gave me an opportunity to run my tape over the job and to discover the footings for the front columns were nowhere deep enough. Between the site foreman and myself we began digging and almost immediately began to dig up bones… taking no notice at first as we both just thought an old butchers shop maybe, however we soon came upon a skull, and then another. We stopped digging, the foreman called the police… they arrived and took one quick look inside the building, saw the remains and commented they weren’t interested as the bones were clearly over 25 years old and advised us if we were interested to contact the local Priest House Museum… they arrived… had a poke around with a stick rather uninterestingly and said.. mmm um, aaar… more plague burials… all in all it took no more than ten minutes and they left telling us to cast the bones back in the hole when its refilled.


Now I was rather taken aback at this casual attitude, and especially after seeing the Time Team reburials and the church service that went with it…


Has anyone else encountered anything similar… ?


PS… after the lunch hour the Irish labourers came back from the pub… saw the skull and bones and fled the site never to return…

I thought that Time Team church service was unecessary and just a bit over the top. But, we today are far more sensitive to death and it's remains than people were in the past. Possibly because death was common and there weren't convenient undertakers to clean and take care of our departed to be later presented to us in a nice box on the day of burial.

Dealing with the all the practicalities of death was part of normal life for everyone, I don't think our ancestors would have been too bothered by any very old bones that happened to surface somewhere.

It's a minefield and getting worse! Up here it's still reasonably sensible, you are expected to report any find immediately to the police, who are always immensely relieved to be told that the bones are old, not play football with skulls and generally keep any human remains separate from other stuff. When it comes to reburial, here's what Historic Scotland say

Quote:

Although not our normal practice, we recognise that the re-burial of late medieval, post-medieval or modern (typically post-Reformation Christian) human remains (with clear affiliations with established contemporary religious groups) will occasionally be considered appropriate. If specifically requested to do so, we may agree to pass on human remains for re-burial after scientific studies have been completed, provided we are satisfied that the request is reasonable and well grounded. We accept the position of certain religions that have a strong need for immediate reburial of the dead (e.g. Judaism)

In England it's different and depends on where the bits and pieces turn up. If you can be bothered, this is English Heritage's volume on bones from Christian cemeteries. If you're not one of them, I'm not sure what the procedure is but they seem to be generally quite strict. There was a big hoo ha about bones from Stonehenge which it was thought had to be reburied after 3 years but the situation is a bit clearer and less rigid now I believe.http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/publications/human-remains-excavated-from-christian-burial-grounds-in-england/16602humanremains1.pdf

Crikey ferval… one could say there’s hardly a stone left unturned in that link… hard going. You say it’s easier on your side of the border…?

When they converted a disused church into a branch of Tesburys near here, they had to go over the graveyard (and the crypt) digging up the bones and reburying them elsewhere. Of course, it reminded me of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFN8Wj37WYI

if you're really interested Norman, here's the Scottish guidelines, http://www.historic-scotland.gov.uk/human-remains.pdf
so if you come across any old bones on any of your trips north, you'll know what to do.

You will encounter the wonderfully titled 'rights of sepulchre'.

I don't know what the guidelines would be here but they would be strongly influenced by Maori protocols. And by the fact that European deaths don't go back beyond 200 years. Maori tapu beliefs mean that any Maori death or discovery of bones that might be Maori would bring about a ceremony to cleanse the area, which might be considered tapu and not to be used or approached for quite some time. I went looking for more information on this and came across this detailed academic site, perhaps only of interest to Ferval or people interested in the formation of Maori pa, of which there is rather a lot of detail. http://www.jps.auckland.ac.nz/document/Volume_66_1957/Volume_66,_No._1/Field_archaeology_in_New_Zealand,_by_J._Golson,_p_64-109/p1 (That colour is hard to see, but I don't suppose that stops it being downloaded.)

They say there is a paucity of good field archaeology here, except for Elsdon Best, but then mention the work of Les Lockerbie. We have Mr Lockerbie's collection on display at our museum (Maori implements, geological formations etc), and have someone expert in rocks cataloguing it all at the moment.

But I couldn't see anything about bodies found.

Yesterday this was on the news. Archaic bones have been found (not perhaps very archaic on a European scale - 200 - 800 years old. There seems as yet to be just one lot of bones found, but they are very anxious to do the right thing, and will probably sent some to a university. The last sentence says they need to be laid to rest again and that has to be done properly. Here they certainly wouldn't be as blase as mentioned in Norman's op. Maori do take death very seriously.

Today there was also news about a family which had been upset at not being able to be present at a cremation of a relative, so they took the body home and burnt it themselves - a bonfire of two days. Police are not laying charges, though I can't feel this can be quite legal.

http://www.stuff.co.nz/national/6696931/Human-bones-found-in-Taranaki-cliff

I used to work with one of the descendants of this chap

http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/southeast/halloffame/historical_figures/william_price.shtml

I remember watching a programme about Kennewick Man and the controversy that followed. At first the remains were thought to be of a European who died in the 19th century,until they were dated to about 9,000 years old.

http://www.mnh.si.edu/arctic/html/kennewick_man.html

Was he an actual descendant, Ian? One of those comments said he had four legitimate sons none of whom had children. But there was mention of illegitimate (are the progeny from unmarried people in the past still called illegitimate now?) children, so maybe that was your colleague's connection.

Well, he was a Price, and claimed to be a descendant, but he may have been merely a relative (it's 30 years ago, so I may be a touch vague on details).