Vampire skull found near Venice

[The Madame X]

Mediaeval 'vampire' skull found near Venice
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/italy/4959363/Mediaeval-vampire-skull-found-in-near-Venice.html

The remains of a woman's skull with a rock thrust into its jaws is evidence of the mediaeval fear of vampires, Italian anthropologists have claimed.


By Nick Squires in Rome
Last Updated: 11:16PM GMT 08 Mar 2009


Scientists found the skull, with its mouth agape and a large slab of rock forced into its mouth, while excavating a mass grave dating from the Middle Ages on an island near Venice.

Female "vampires" were often blamed for spreading the plague epidemics through Europe, said Matteo Borrini of Florence University.

Wedging a rock or brick into the mouth of a suspected vampire was a way of preventing the person from feeding on the bodies of other plague victims and rising from the grave to attack the living, he told a meeting of the American Academy of Forensic Sciences in Denver last week.

The idea that plague victims might also be vampires may have arisen because blood often dribbled from the mouths of those who died from the disease.

The woman's skeleton was found in a mass grave which was established on the island of Lazzaretto Nuovo, in Venice's lagoon, when plague swept the city in 1576.

Dr Borrini said gravediggers shoved the brick into the woman's mouth with such force that it broke some of her teeth.

Gravediggers would check corpses for any sign that they had bitten or chewed on their shrouds – a sure sign of vampirism, he said.

Venice was particularly hard hit by the plague – when a later wave of the Black Death swept through the city between 1630 and 1631, the epidemic killed 50,000 out of the population of 150,000.

The skull could be the first such "vampire" to have been forensically examined, Mr Borrini said.

However, another expert in the field said he had found similar skeletons in Poland.

While the discovery was exciting, "claiming it as the first vampire is a little ridiculous" Peer Moore-Jansen of Wichita State University in Kansas told New Scientist magazine.

[Wulfsunus]

Here is a bit more on the same article . . .


http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090313/ap_ ... _of_venice

Italy dig unearths female 'vampire' in Venice


ROME – An archaeological dig near Venice has unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuck between her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be a vampire.

The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancient vampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythical bloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseases spread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.

The well-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovo island, north of the lagoon city, amid other corpses buried in a mass grave during an epidemic of plague that hit Venice in 1576.

"Vampires don't exist, but studies show people at the time believed they did," said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist and anthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over the last two years. "For the first time we have found evidence of an exorcism against a vampire."

Medieval texts show the belief in vampires was fueled by the disturbing appearance of decomposing bodies, Borrini told The Associated Press by telephone.

During epidemics, mass graves were often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance upon older bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouth and with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.

"These characteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies," Borrini said. "But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a hole in the shroud, so they would say: 'This guy is alive, he's drinking blood and eating his shroud.'"

Modern forensic science shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluid seeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrini said. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in the mouth area, he said.

At the time however, what passed for scientific texts taught that "shroud-eaters" were vampires who fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague in order to increase their ranks.

To kill the undead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by later literature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into the vampire's mouth so that it would starve to death, Borrini said.

That's what is believed to have happened to the woman found on the Lazzaretto island, which was used as a quarantine zone by Venice. Aged around 60, she died of the plague during the epidemic that also claimed the life of the painter Titian.

Much later, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave was reopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instruments on several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologists show that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.

Such a reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to the superstitions about "shroud-eaters," said Piero Mannucci, the vice president of the Italian Society of Anthropology and Ethnology.

"Maybe a priest or a gravedigger put the brick in her mouth, which is what was normally done in such cases," Mannucci said.

The anthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini's research, said that at a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way for the terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics that killed millions during the Middle Ages. Jews were also often accused of spreading the disease.

Borrini said the discovery shows that vampires in popular culture were originally quite different from the elegant, aristocratic blood-drinker depicted in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel "Dracula" and in countless Hollywood revisitations.

"The real vampire of tradition was different," he said. "It was just a decomposing body."