An ancient man’s remains were hacked apart and kept in a garage
1 min read
Summary
The remains of a victim of the Mount Vesuvius eruption, which archaeologists found in the city of Herculaneum contained a first-of-its-kind discovery.
This discovery consisted of pieces of the victim’s brain that had been turned to glass by the extreme heat generated by the volcanic eruption.
While findings like this are damaging to the remains of the victims, a trade-off is often necessary in order to further our understanding of history, according to experts.
Karl Harrison, a forensic archaeologist from the University of Exeter, highlighted one particularly brutal example of damage having been done to archaeological remains in an act of excavation.
This involved the 1981 excavation of ‘St Bees Man’, a medieval man found in a lead coffin, whereby the man’s coffin was opened with an angle grinder, and his body was “stuck in a truck”.