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History is filled with stories of great people, from kings to freedom fighters. But the records don't tell us much about the day-to-day lives of ordinary people. They don't tell us how they dealt with one of the greatest transformations in history, the rise of Christianity.
But now, exciting new discoveries in DNA, science, and archaeology are filling in the gaps. They reveal that pagan practices continued for centuries after the coming of Christianity. Across Europe, many feared dark supernatural forces and the return of the dead.
In the last 10 years, new advances in science and technology have enhanced our knowledge of the past like never before. Some of the most exciting research is in the field of genetics. Our genome is the sum of all our genes. It's the sum of all the DNA that we have in our cells. And what that contains is the blueprint for the organisms that we are. Using human remains from hundreds and even thousands of years ago, scientists can sequence the DNA of long-forgotten people, revealing fascinating information about how they lived and died.
We start from scratch. We're trying to look for good samples that we're likely to get DNA out of. What we have to do is we have to ask archaeologists what sites are good, what sites are interesting, what questions should we even be asking. When it comes to the medieval period, with the building of roads and things and cutting across huge swathes of land, we have found dozens and dozens, hundreds of sites that we never knew existed before.
One of the most intriguing sites is located on the shores of Lough Key in the west of Ireland. This area is cloaked in myth and legend. Once it was home to some of the most powerful clans in Ireland. Recent archaeological finds here cast light on the early medieval period, a time of major change and transition. St. Patrick brought Christianity to Ireland in the fifth century, but people didn't become Christian overnight. It took a long time for them to surrender their old rituals and beliefs.
A thousand years ago, this island was called the Rock of Lough Key. From here, a family called the Mcdermadas ruled much of the surrounding territory. Like other Irish lords, they worked hand in hand with the Christian church to establish the new faith. And one of the greatest events to happen in early Irish history was the advent of Christianity because Christianity did not just introduce a new religion, but it brought with it a complete culture, a culture of the Christian world.
It influenced every aspect of life and influenced Irish thought in particular. And of course, the other thing that Christianity introduced to Ireland was writing, writing and reading. And this was a new technology. And once the Irish started to write, they continued writing and writing and produced vast amounts of material during the period sometimes referred to as the Dark Ages in Europe.
Fascinating evidence of this story was preserved here on Trinity Island on Lough Key. The island is now deserted, but these trees hide the remains of what was once a place of great learning and scholarship. At the monastery of the Holy Trinity, the Mcdermadas sponsored an order of monks to take up residence and compile the historical records of the area. Living under strict rules of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the monks chronicled events of major importance on a year-by-year basis. These records belong to a great body of literature known as the annals.
We are lucky in Ireland; we have a massive collection of annals. The annals are so called because essentially they recorded events on a yearly basis. The big events, such as deaths of major people, reigns of kings, battles, and extreme weather.
The rock of Lough Key was burned by lightning. Six score or seven score of distinguished persons were destroyed along with 15 men of the race of kings and chieftains. Their escaped not alive but Ker Makera with a very small number of the multitude of his people.
The monks were bilingual. They wrote in Gaelic when recording local Irish history and in Latin when compiling details about the church, its bishops, and its popes. It seems that from a very early stage, the elites and the church leaders worked very closely together. Even just by the wealth of the church that we see as early as the 7th century, we can see that they gained such a foothold in society because they worked closely with the current power structures.
There is certainly evidence in terms of how Christianity was introduced and spread across Ireland. Um, and it was actually it would be a tactic used by St. Patrick and others who were spreading the gospel to try to convert the leaders, the clan leaders, the kings, because if they could convert them, it would follow on fairly quickly that their subjects would take up the same religion as their leaders.
For many years, the monks chronicled major events not just around Lough Key, but all over Ireland. They left an incredibly rich source of medieval history. But whose history is it? Scholars are beginning to understand just how one-sided the annals were. The affairs of the church and the powerful ruling classes make up most of the entries.
A strict class system shaped medieval society. There wasn't a lot of social mobility. But what was important was one's position within this hierarchy. For the elites, land, ownership, and territory defined one's status. But these records don't actually tell us much about the ordinary people. They don't tell us how much or how little they subscribed to the new Christian faith, or how they lived, what they ate, who they loved, and how they died.
Canadian archaeologist Chris Reed is on a mission to uncover their story. I was always fascinated by certain elements of the past and I suppose about the human condition, particularly things like religion and ritual and the kinds of things that people believe and wanting to, I guess, figure out where all that came from. And archaeology seemed to offer the best chances to answer some of those questions I had.
The underclasses of the population, they're pretty invisible in the histories. And I guess that's where archaeology gets to lend, you know, I suppose, um, most to the story of the past is we get to flesh out the lives of regular people. So when we're actually excavating, say, an early medieval cemetery, we're actually looking at the bodies of the people who lived in this place during that time. I mean, we can tell a lot about how they lived and what their health was like and what sort of, you know, traumas and diseases they might have been having to deal with.
Around 10 years ago, Chris Reed led a major archaeological dig on the shores of Lough Key. It was a medieval excavation, I suppose, covering a time span from about 700 AD to 1400 AD. The site contained the remains of as many as 3,000 humans. From these, Chris and his team managed to recover a total of 137 skeletons.
We are looking at a period here which is only a couple of hundred years after the establishment of Christianity in Ireland. Chris's discovery has given us a fascinating insight into life and death in medieval times. Although people were nominally Christian, they followed very ancient rituals when they buried their dead. The general rule is that when a Christian person is buried, there's no putting in of grave goods or offerings, you know, things for the afterlife. But one thing that sort of we found throughout all of the burials across the period were quartz pebbles. They came in sort of large and small format, and we literally collected all of them that we came across. They're prevalent everywhere in the soil, but we certainly found greater concentrations in the burials themselves.
What the quartz stones signify has been a mystery to archaeologists for some time. But one thing is certain. This strange practice goes back thousands of years into prehistory. It evokes a forgotten religion that was cloaked in power and mystery. In Ireland, we have the Neolithic passage tomb of Newgrange, which during the excavation, they found a huge amount of large quartz pebbles outside the entrance, this very, very, very special site, which is quite deliberately, through its alignment with the rising sun at the winter solstice, associated with the light. Um, and I think that's possibly the magical connection with quartz is that it seems to be symbolic of light. So if you go visit any rural cemetery in Ireland and you look at the rectangular grave plot as it sits in front of the headstone, you'll see white glass chippings. Why are people covering the graves with these shiny white stones? We don't really know what the meaning of quartz pebbles are when they're interred with a body. It would have been quite a normal thing in pagan Ireland to put grave goods in with burials. Um, but in the Christian tradition, that is kind of frowned upon. It's not really a done thing. So this to interseal pebbles within a grave may have been a way of circumventing the laws of the time or the incoming burial rights of the time.
Did the coming of Christianity sever the connection to these ancient beliefs? To answer this question, we must explore a decisive event in medieval history: the mission of St. Patrick.
As the patron saint of Ireland, Patrick needs no introduction. His feast day on the 17th of March is celebrated by colorful parades all over the world. Patrick came to Ireland in the fifth century AD. According to the traditional version of events, he traveled around the island and eradicated the old pagan beliefs, replacing them with Christianity. Afterwards, Ireland became the land of saints and scholars. But as historians now understand, that's not exactly what happened.
One of the main things that they probably objected to were the Druids and the teachings of the Druids, specifically about gods and things like that, and the rituals and sacrifices, ceremonies, those kinds of things that the Druids did. By the 7th century, we have the Druids losing their status and being very much peripheral figures, kind of like witch doctor kind of characters, whereas once they probably enjoyed a very central role in society.
Here in Ireland, people worshipped lots of different deities. There were some larger national ones and there were local deities. So when another god sort of got added to the pie, it wasn't that big a deal. But the thing about Christianity is that it's monotheistic. There's only one God, and that over time, the other deities were reduced down to mythic characters from times gone by.
This holy well in County Clare in Western Ireland is dedicated to the Christian St. Bridget. Her feast day is on the 1st of February, marking the beginning of spring. But originally, St. Bridget's Day was a pagan festival dedicated to a pagan fertility goddess. Um, St. Bridget is a very well-developed Christian character, but her feast day falls on what was almost certainly a pre-Christian feast day. And there was a goddess known to the Irish and to the British as well, and possibly to the Gauls, who had the same name, Brigantia, the exalted one.
The early church took ownership of the goddess and Christianized her, calling her St. Bridget. Throughout the Western world, the church allowed many old pagan practices to continue under a veneer of Christianity. There are some things that we know that have survived, at least thematically. Say, it's the festivals of the pre-Christian period. Things like Halloween, things like the 1st of May, or Beltane. Those are important days in the year. How they were celebrated in ancient times is difficult to say, but I think the themes survive. And, you know, the theme of the end of harvest, moving from summer into winter, that's an important juncture, it's an important point for an agricultural people. And the fact that they celebrate that through feasting, and also this belief that the other world and this world are quite close at that time, is probably something that relates to the old religion that survived in folk tradition and in literature.
Rathcroghan in County Roscommon was once the most important royal site in the west of Ireland. Kings and queens were crowned here, and it's a landscape rich in myth and mystery. This ancient complex contains as many as 240 separate archaeological sites encased within just 2.5 square miles. Traces of human settlement from as far back as 3,200 BC are found here. In it is one of Ireland's most important prehistoric sites.
It's the royal site for Connacht. Um, it's the western prehistoric capital, in a sense. Um, and the reason for it, in many respects, is very simply down to the quality of the land that's out there. Um, so it's a limestone-rich plateau with a good soil cover, which is brilliant for raising cattle and for grazing animals. On the top of this mound, it seems there was a building there which was probably a temple or ceremonial space. You could imagine the king being brought up in a procession to this space. Druids or poets maybe reading out their genealogy, presenting them as being this new king. You know, probably events that took place over a number of days, or maybe more. I think to think of when you look at this landscape now, it's quite bare; if you see a few sheep and cows, but if you can imagine it with thousands of people thronging this place, and once you bring in people and these high concepts, the landscape comes alive.
When St. Patrick went on his mission to Ireland, he headed for Rathcroghan. Its role as a gathering place went back for many centuries, as did its association with the local rulers, and eventually, these rulers embraced Patrick's Christian religion. It's not a flicking of a light switch. There's a whole conversion period, and Patrick is said to have baptized two daughters of the High King of Ireland, Ethna and Fidelma. And they're said to have been baptized at a well site on the eastern slopes of Rathcroghan. So the fact that St. Patrick is regarded as coming to Rathcroghan in order to baptize those of a pre-Christian faith, that action is perhaps a continuation again of the pre-Christian activity of assemblies, of gatherings, of fairs taking place at the summit of Rathcroghan mound.
By the 7th century, we see in documents that the church was very sophisticated and very well organized. However, we also see that pre-Christian elements survived for many centuries after the formal establishment of the church. In ancient times, people gathered on hilltops all over Ireland to celebrate a great harvest festival, Lughnasadh. Lughnasadh was once a very widespread festival in Ireland. A festival in honor of Lugh, who was this important god to the pre-Christians. And this is the beginning of the period the first of fruits are ripening, when crops will be harvested. There would be games, dancing, celebration.
They may have drawn on ideas like fertility, images to do with fire, new life and growth. But when the Irish changed religion from paganism to Christianity, they had a lot of the same concerns. You know, whether you're praying to the pagan goddess or the Christian God, you would still be in spring concerned with food. You'd still be concerned with fertility. You'd still be concerned with making new beginnings and starting new life.
This great wedge-shaped mountain on Ireland's west coast was one of the most sacred ancient festival sites. With the coming of Christianity, the mountain became Croagh Patrick, a Christian pilgrim site. And St. Patrick took on the role previously held by the pagan god Lugh. There are stories to do with Lugh about him defeating an older god and saving information to do with the harvest and how to have a proper harvest. And it seems that that idea probably got recast in a Christian sense for a Christian people who were celebrating this feast day. And perhaps it's their attempts to try and change and bring the likes of these pre-Christian centers under the authority of the Christian religion.
It wasn't just in Ireland that pagan sites were converted to Christianity. The cult of the god Lugh is found all over Western Europe. The whole of life was infused with spirituality, with gods and goddesses, with demons and all sorts of other agents of the supernatural. That's how they lived their lives.
Deep in the French Pyrenees stands the great medieval church of Saint-Bertrand-de-Comminges. Around 2,000 years ago, an invading Roman army occupied this region. They built a town here as a base from which to pacify the local Celtic tribes. The name of the city is Lugdunum, which is a Romanization, a Latinization of Celtic words. Lugdunum means a fortification, a fort, and Lug is the great Celtic god, the god of light. Lugh was worshipped here in the Pyrenees just as he was in Ireland. We do think that there was a temple up on the top of the hill under where the cathedral is now, a major cult center to Lugh in this part of the Pyrenees. But he clearly was an important Gallic god as well as in Spain. After all, the capital of Gaul, Lugdunum, the modern city of Lyon, was called after Lugh. So you find dedications to him all over the place.
Almost a thousand years ago, the Christian Bishop Saint Bertrand came here. Just like St. Patrick, he carried out a mission to Christianize the locals. We're told that when Saint Bertrand was building the church, the people up in the Pyrenees, their religion was pretty dubious, and that he mounted a campaign of evangelization. In a way, that cathedral is that campaign of evangelization materialized in stone. People would have come from all over the diocese for the great festivals of the church. There's some evidence that people came from Spain. It's saying that Christianity, the true faith, is making its mark on everything. It has triumphed over the demons of paganism. The gods and goddesses are dead and gone, and that all spiritual power now rests with the church and with its representative, the bishop. And yet, pagan influences still lingered on.
The limestone plateau of the Burren in County Clare is one of Europe's most distinctive landscapes. Deep in this stone wilderness stands the imposing medieval fort of Caherconnell. Built around the 10th century AD, a massive circular dry stone wall surrounds the stone fort. Caherconnell is a prime example of the kind of circular fortification that predominated in Ireland over a thousand years ago. And to this day, it remains a powerful and imposing site on the landscape. The fort was home to an elite family, probably the O'Lochlans, known as the kings of the Burren. But what about the ordinary people? They weren't buried in prominent sites.
Recently, archaeologists undertook a full-scale excavation of another circular fort, the newly discovered settlement of Ranala, some 100 kilometers northeast of Caherconnell. Their work gives us striking new insight into the lives of the ordinary folk. So when a road is planned, when a route is selected on a map, um we have a variety of techniques available to us um that locate the archaeology and identify archaeology along the route. The archaeologists use drone photography to obtain a comprehensive aerial picture of the site and how the dig is progressing on a day-to-day basis. But what we're doing now is we're using much more up-to-date techniques, much more scientific techniques to find out about the people who lived on these sites.
The excavations revealed a ring fort, the most common type of settlement in Ireland at the time. Ring forts were generally the homes of elite families, but the ordinary folk worked and lived alongside them. With the rise of Christianity, they found that the church played an increasingly large role in their lives. And yet, they had an entire culture of their own that had nothing to do with the Church of Rome.
The archaeologists uncovered evidence of not one but three ring forts, each one encircling the other. They were built at different stages, showing that the site expanded over time. It was in use from the 6th to the 11th century, and it would have been a hive of activity. This was the home of an extended community who engaged in a range of activities. The people used the ring fort as a hub for food production as well as light industry like leather work and metal work. We found lots of metal working evidence here. So metal artifacts like ring pins, rings, bracelet fragments, shears, knives, a full spectrum of metal artifacts that indicate that there was substantial activity in metal working going on here. This was the closest thing these people had to a business park or industrial estate. But they also used it for something else, a practice we don't normally associate with industry and manufacture.
When the archaeologists excavated to the southeast, they discovered something unexpected. Hidden beneath the soil were bones, human bones. Ranala turned out to be a very significant graveyard. Initially, we indicated about 12 skeletons were there, but as we excavated and as the excavations went on, we found over a thousand skeletons. The main enclosure was used as a graveyard for the ordinary people of this area. From this place of death, the team salvaged extraordinary information about life in Ireland some thousand years ago. The bones were sent to Queen's University, Belfast for analysis.
I specialize in osteoarchaeology. So that's the study of human skeletal remains. So I've been fortunate to be involved in a number of projects looking at medieval burial grounds in Ireland over the years. Um, one of the most recent of these was the Ranala burial ground in County Roscommon. Besides Ranala seems to be a settlement cemetery. So you've got secular activities going on as well as the burials. And I think it probably was what we call a ferta. So that would have been, you know, like an ancestral sort of maybe a burial ground in a particular region. Um, so a community would have used it over and over again, you know, across the generations.
We archaeologists for decades and decades were basing all of our interpretations on the little bits and pieces, the traces that we find. The amount every year that breakthroughs in DNA research are contributing to the story and changing the story is unbelievable. Can tell so much more about who they were and where they came from, what kinds of diets they ate. We are in the constant process of rewriting the past, and DNA is playing a massive role in that.
Bone samples were sent to Trinity College Dublin for the DNA to be extracted and analyzed. But getting DNA from bones that have lain in the earth for centuries is not a straightforward process. There are special challenges in working with archaeological DNA because DNA with time breaks up and gets diluted by bacterial DNA and soil DNA and all sorts of different organisms. But it's still possible if there's DNA left in a bone, which there isn't always. If there's DNA left from the original person, then it's possible to sequence it.
In a modern human, your genome is stored up quite neatly in 23 pairs of chromosomes. But when we try to get DNA from a bone sample, these chromosomes have been broken into millions and millions of really, really small pieces. So what we do is we have to extract all these tiny fragments and isolate them, and then we have to sequence them all, all these tiny, tiny little pieces. What we basically do is try to piece them all back together to recreate the genome of this ancient person, like a very big jigsaw puzzle. Human genomes differ only a very, very small amount from one another. So I'd say it's sort of like having the jigsaw box that you already know what the picture should look like.
The team managed to solve the jigsaw, sequencing the DNA of several adults and children that were buried at Ranala. Their findings backed up the archaeologists' hunch that this was a closely-knit community, but its members suffered all sorts of afflictions and many died young.
In terms of the osteology, there were some really interesting features at Ranala. So one of them was a lot of children had died. There was a few of the burials were particularly poignant because, you know, you could just sense the loss of the living who buried the dead. So there was a little girl of about seven, seven and a half, eight and a half, and she was buried with a younger boy. And we know the sex of these children through the DNA analysis because osteologically we would just say children. So that immediately sort of enriches our knowledge of these people. The evidence suggests that mothers were often malnourished and that they kept their babies indoors to protect them. But lack of sunlight damaged their health. The people of Ranala had to contend with worse things than simple malnutrition. Lethal diseases also ravaged members of the community.
This is the skeleton of a young woman. So she would have been an adolescent when she died. Now she had an atypical burial, and she was sort of crouched on she was lying on her back. Her legs were pulled up towards her chest. And whenever we looked more closely at her skeleton, we could see she was absolutely ravaged with disease. Um, this is her tibia, or her shin bone. And you can see, I mean, that surface should be very smooth and straight, you know, just like here. But you can see there's this massive big cavity in it. And you can see it's all surrounded by kind of pitting and irregular bone. So that's a sign of massive infection. So her leg probably was very swollen, probably had, you know, separating abscesses. So would have been painful, smelly, and just very unpleasant for her. So she probably had a very poor quality of life before she died.
Of the hundreds of bodies uncovered at Ranala, most belonged to children and young people. Babies were particularly vulnerable. To die young was not uncommon at this time. Indeed, not many people lived past the age of 35 or 40. More than a thousand years later, we can see the marks that hardship and affliction left on these people. And yet, they are not the most intriguing thing about this medieval ring fort. Although the remains found here date from early Christian times, they regularly show evidence of pagan practices.
In traditional Christian burial, the deceased are placed on their backs facing east towards the rising sun to symbolize resurrection. But at Ranala, not all of the dead received this treatment. For the most part, people would have been buried in ring forts in the supine position. So lying on their backs with their heads to the west, looking at the rising sun. On occasion, we see variations of those unusual burials where people are buried in different ways. Um, in Ranala, we had one individual, a woman who was buried with her knees crunched up to her chest in a very compact burial. We also had some burials where the bodies were buried with their faces to the ground. Um, we're not quite sure what those were about. The kind of common thinking is that this was some sort of a slight on the body, where they were being disrespected in some way. Maybe they weren't part of the community, or maybe they were outsiders who had died during battle.
Another burial signaled that two male members of the community had an unusually close relationship. One particular burial at Ranala was of two men buried together with their arms around each other. It may be a simple situation that these men were close friends in life. We know that they were close in age when they were buried. A young adult male and he was buried alongside an adolescent boy. So the boy was about 16. So, you know, he's an older teenager. Um, and again, they were sort of wrapped around each other. They were both sort of looking into each other, and they're sort of lying slightly face downwards. But whenever you looked at the positioning of the arms, they were again fully embracing.
DNA analysis showed that the two males were distant relatives, and it's possible they were foster brothers. Fosterage was a common practice in medieval Ireland, and foster brothers could be very close. But there may also be another explanation. We do have to sort of pose the question, you know, maybe there was a sexual aspect. You know, maybe they were lovers. Um, and we get accounts again that sort of suggest, you know, there was homosexuality in early medieval Ireland. Now, um, a lot of the information comes in church records, so like the penitentials, and it's usually dealing out punishments, but the punishments seem to be quite minor. So I think society probably was reasonably relaxed about homosexuality, and that the church was just trying to impose some sort of control.
The discoveries suggest this society was only loosely controlled by the church. The people who lived and died here had their own traditions and practices. But even still, the archaeologists were shocked by the next grave they excavated. There was one child, one young boy between 7 and a half and 9 and a half years old. He was decapitated, in what is, you know, quite a violent fashion. As far as we've been able to ascertain, the youngest in Ireland at the time who had been decapitated in this way.
This is the remains of the 7 and a half to 9 and a half year old boy. So, you can see, um, this is the second, third, and fourth neck vertebrae. And you can see a clean cut here through the back of the vertebrae. And the second one also has evidence of nicks, you know, caused by the sharp weapon. Um, and they've extended to the side of his mandible as well. So he probably had his head tightly bent forward and was hit from behind. We interpreted this as formal execution. And because the cuts were pretty severe, you can see that there's actually again a cut right across his mandible, and you can see little nicks at the back. So that probably all happened in a number of blows.
Children were very heavily protected under the laws of the time. To do this kind of violence to a child would have drawn a very severe penalty from the lawmakers of the time. This is a very extreme act. What would have caused a young boy to be executed? I think it's perhaps something to do with getting to the adults in his life as a way of really hurting them by killing a child. We have no way of knowing, to be honest with you. But the burial rite he was afforded was, you know, in the normal tradition, obviously with a lot of love by his family, or a greater quantity of grave goods with him than it would have been normally.
A decapitated child, people buried face down, two men lying in a close embrace. These burial practices suggest a culture that can only be guessed at. The early medieval people had many traditional beliefs that the church did not sanction, and supernatural places and creatures haunted their dreams.
A short distance north of Ranala lies an ancient site that is one of the strangest in Ireland. Some believe it to be an entrance to the other world, and it's known as Oweynagat, or the Cave of Cats. It was described, from a Christian perspective, as a mouth to hell. This notion of the other world itself as a concept is something that we see portrayed in different ways. Sometimes it's an underworld realm, and in others, it's almost seen like a space that surrounds our space, sort of in parallel to it, and you can only tap into it in certain places at certain times.
Oweynagat is regarded as being an entrance place, not as a door or a gate to hell, but actually as an entrance place to the other world. Some of those who enter the cave feel they are on not only a physical threshold but a threshold between two worlds. Such feelings are heightened by the cave's unusual appearance: a narrow fissure through the ground, enclosed by limestone walls that look almost like the ribs of a giant creature.
Ancient tales say that during Samhain, the great festival of the dead, the gate to the other world opens. Samhain is the point in time in which we see the liminal time between autumn and winter. It's the changeover from the time of harvest into the time of coldness, of deadness, of lack of growth. The old tales say that during the days between autumn and winter, a set of supernatural monsters, beasts, and demons emerged from the cave. We have the stories of the war goddess, the Morrigan, coming out of there on Halloween and riding around on her chariot at this great festival of Samhain, this juncture point between summer and winter, and the time when the other world was closest to our world. There are stories of giant cats, werewolves, three-headed monsters, and huge wild boars that cause chaos on the landscape.
With the coming of Christianity, the church attempted to assimilate the Cave of Cats into the new religion. Around the 9th century, the church claimed that the cave was not a gateway to the pagan otherworld, but the entrance to the Christian underworld, to hell. Another story from medieval literature talks about Nera, who is a warrior who goes into the underworld to this place and he finds himself not in a dark cave under the ground in Roscommon, but instead finds himself in a beautiful sunny environment, and there's flowers growing there that only grow in spring and in summer. And when he eventually comes out of there, he brings these spring flowers and summer flowers out and presents them to the king and queen as proof that he had been in the other world. Time moves differently there as well. He spends what seems like a year there, and only a couple of hours have passed in the real world.
Irish folklore contains many stories of people who die and then come back. For whatever reason, they are not content to go across to the next life. Perhaps because they still have business in this one. Archaeology shows how this belief influenced burial practices during the Iron Age, long before the coming of Christianity. There are a couple of examples of bog bodies. These are bodies that are found preserved in the bog. Evidence of having been physically tied to the ground. A man that was found in Gallagh, County Galway, had two shafts of wood that were stuck in either side of him, and the idea was that these were to bind him to the ground. Um, in Old Croghan, he had piercings through his biceps where they put ropes through, and it's thought that they were for physically restraining him to the ground. So the implication is you don't tie them down unless you think they're going to get up. We have evidence from a number of different bog bodies that, well, the general interpretation is that they were ritual killings, and that they were intentionally put into the bog, and in some cases restrained or weighed down with stones, because they were powerful beings and thus in danger of coming back or causing havoc for people's lives.
I imagine that as Christianity took hold in Ireland, that the occasional not quite dead yet person climbing out of a grave and terrorizing people would have kept the belief alive that some people were susceptible to coming back from the dead.
Chris Reed has found fascinating evidence to confirm that this belief persisted in Christian times. Some years ago, Chris investigated a forgotten cemetery near Lough Key and made a shocking discovery. He brought the remains to his college laboratory for analysis. We had a number of interesting burials that you would classify as deviant burials. What we mean by deviant is not that the people were deviant, but that the burial itself, in terms of some of its characteristics, deviates from the norm.
Two most interesting ones include one of the individuals we have laid out in front of us here. It was clear that the burial was anything but Christian. Each of the skulls had a large stone inserted in its mouth. The jaw was propped open, and this was intentionally set in quite solidly. There's no question that it fell into the mouth or anything like that. It was very definitely positioned into the mouth. And the burial beside it had an even larger stone, this one much more angular, wedged into the mouth, and it's so large that it would have dislocated the jaw to make it fit. Basically, they were both clearly inserted after the individuals had died. There's no indication that this was done while they were living.
This is one of the few instances where archaeologists have discovered human skulls with large stones in their mouths. To Chris Reed, it suggests a strange and powerful ritual. When somebody dies, their spirit, their soul leaves their body with their last breath. And the mouth is the orifice through which that happens, right? Um, that is where your soul escapes and will then rise up to heaven. So this mouth is sort of a dangerous, kind of liminal part of the body in that it's a portal. And the fear was that if somebody wasn't ready to be dead yet, that their soul would be restless and could try to get back inside the body, and thus blocking the mouth would have been a way to keep that from happening. The other thing would be that somebody could be considered susceptible to possession by an evil spirit or something like that, and thus the mouth would be blocked. There is a tradition in Europe which seems to go right back to do with the idea of burying certain people in a particular way which seems to imply that you don't want them to rise again.
In a Viking grave in Denmark, the body of a woman was treated even more strangely. Those who buried her placed two large boulders directly on top of the body, almost certainly because they thought she would rise from the dead. They may have feared that the woman was a sorceress with supernatural powers. Were the Lough Key men also feared as supernatural beings, or is there another explanation? We know, for example, there's a fifth-century graveyard in Italy. So a couple of hundred years before these Irish burials, where there was a young girl who had a stone shoved in her mouth in the very same way. And the thinking was that it was perhaps a plague grave. Perhaps they believed that the dead would rise either physically or in spiritual form, and that they would spread disease in this way. Perhaps it is the case that these Irish guys had disease, or perhaps for whatever reason, maybe they were murder victims or suicides, that they needed to be treated in this different way.
These bizarre discoveries bring home how little we know about what people believed a thousand years ago. In medieval Ireland, Denmark, and Italy, and across Europe, people had their own ways of interpreting and rationalizing the world. Practices that seem strange to us today may have been perfectly logical to them. One thing is certain: medieval culture was rich and complex, and we have only just scratched its surface. But new techniques and technologies have already given archaeologists and scientists more knowledge than they could have hoped for even a decade ago. Without doubt, in the future, further fascinating discoveries will be made.