A Day for the Dead

Archaeologists are becoming more interested in burials lately. Well, they were always interested in burials of rich people because sometimes that is where you found really interesting and valuable things. But now they are interested in burials of ordinary people. In the last few days we visited several burial places that were extremely interesting.

The first is called Isola Sacra and it was an island where people in ancient Rome buried their loved ones and also came to remember them. This is a bit out of the way, so often people don’t visit here, but it was very interesting, especially with the knowledge of Dr. Galinsky and Dr. White. The tombs looked like houses and were actually built on what looked like streets. People would visit their loved ones graves inside the little houses. Some of them were cremated and others were buried. Before this time people mostly cremated remains, but starting at this time some people buried the dead. There are very rich large and painted tombs that held whole families and also small humble looking tombs were the less wealthy buried their dead. There were many pots just outside of tombs where the families put the cremated remains of their slaves. At most of the archaeological sites that we have visited you only see what I call rubble and my archaeologist friends call walls and assorted other structural names.

At the second burial place they have left the remains just where they were found. Nicola Denzy was the expert who explained this site and the catacombs. She had never been to this particular place because it is fairly new and only open for paying groups. She said it is kept at a certain temperature so that the artifacts do not degrade. They are able to leave things out which they would normally remove and put into a museum. Dr. Denzy also took us to a catacomb. These are caves that run below the city of Rome for miles and miles. The one that we looked at was named after Pricilla because it is believed that the Priscilla who is talked about in the New Testament of the Bible (Priscilla and Aquilla) was buried here. We were not allowed to take pictures in the catacombs, so here is a picture of Dill at the door we used to enter into them. When you open the door you go down a bunch of stairs and into caves turning every which way. On both sides of the walls there are niches where people were buried. These tunnels also lead to chapels and some tombs that you can go into. There are several places that have very interesting painted walls.

Finally, since I know that latrines can be very interesting (we all need to use them, even in ancient times they did!) I am including a picture of one in Ostia. This is very much like the one in Hierapolis that I put a picture in earlier, except that more of it is left to look at so you can tell how it was used.