Why Dig Up the Dead and Stack Them? The Graveyard Was Full

A churchyard serving a settlement for centuries fills up, and where burial must happen on consecrated ground within a walled town there is no possibility of expansion. The solution adopted widely was to treat a grave as temporary, allowing a body several years to decompose and then exhuming the bones to make the plot available again. The bones themselves could not simply be discarded, since they were expected to be needed at the resurrection and were treated with respect, so a building was provided to hold them. The same plot could then be reused indefinitely, which made a small churchyard serve an unlimited number of burials.

Storage was orderly rather than a heap, and the conventions are consistent:

• •Long bones stacked lengthways in courses, like firewood
• •Skulls set in rows along shelves or built into the walls
• •Smaller bones placed loose behind or below
• •Bones mixed together rather than kept by individual
• •Inscriptions addressing the visitor about mortality
• •Access permitted, since the display was meant to be seen

Mixing the bones of thousands of people together sits oddly with a belief in bodily resurrection, and the tension was addressed directly. The usual answer was that God would have no difficulty reassembling what he had made, so the disorder of the bones was theologically irrelevant, and treating them with visible respect satisfied the obligation owed to them. The displays also served a deliberate purpose, confronting visitors with what they would become, which fitted a devotional tradition that encouraged contemplating death as a corrective to worldly attachment. Inscriptions in several of the best known examples address the visitor in the voice of the dead, pointing out that the visitor will shortly be on the other side of the arrangement.

One box bearing this description became internationally known for a claim that did not survive examination. A limestone box announced in 2002 carried an inscription in Aramaic naming a man, his father and his brother, and was presented as first-century evidence relating to a New Testament figure, which drew enormous attention. Israeli authorities prosecuted the owner for forgery, arguing that part of the inscription was modern, and the trial ran for seven years before ending in acquittal on the ground that forgery had not been proved beyond doubt, which is not the same as the object being authenticated. Scholars remain divided, and the episode is a standard illustration of the problem with unprovenanced antiquities.

Examples survive across Catholic and Orthodox Europe and beyond. A chapel at Sedlec in the Czech Republic holds the bones of perhaps forty thousand people arranged into chandeliers, garlands and a coat of arms by a woodcarver in the 1870s, which is the most elaborate anywhere. Rome, Palermo and Évora in Portugal hold substantial decorated examples. Greek Orthodox monasteries on Mount Athos maintain them as ordinary working practice rather than as monuments. The Paris catacombs are a related case, created when overflowing city cemeteries were emptied into disused quarries from 1786. The practice continues in parts of Greece and the Balkans, where exhumation after a fixed period remains normal.

Treating a grave as temporary and exhuming the bones after several years let a walled town reuse a small churchyard indefinitely, and the bones were housed respectfully because they were expected to be needed again. They were stacked in courses with skulls in rows, mixed rather than kept by individual, on the reasoning that reassembly would present God no difficulty. The displays were meant to be visited and to confront the living.