Message #67750

[Druid]

The people buried in this graveyard clearly belonged to the elite of their day. They were laid to rest not in caskets, but in large burial chambers. On the east side of the chambers lay piles of shards -- remnants of pottery shattered on purpose at the site. The immediate impulse is to imagine a funeral feast where the bereaved shattered plates against a wall. "Careful," warns Crummy. "We can't know what happened there exactly."

This find is unusually rich. One dead body was interred with a ball of verdigris, either for medicinal or cosmetic purposes. A small Roman flagon of perfume from Augustan times was also in the chamber. But the funeral items weren't just for superficial things: Another grave had an inkpot. A literary man, we might think, but Crummy recommends caution again. In archaeology an inkpot is just an inkpot. After all nothing would prevent an illiterate from shoving Shakespeare's collected works up on his living-room shelf today.