Backhoe history
The sad part of this story is that nobody cares about the identity of the other guy:
The mystery surrounding the skulls began in 1826, 21 years after [Friedrich] Schiller died in Weimar, when the local mayor had 23 skulls retrieved from a mass grave in which the poet was buried. Many eminent people at that time were buried in mass graves.
The mayor identified the largest skull as Schiller's and it was brought to the home of his contemporary Goethe, who wrote a poem about it, according to German scholar Albrecht Schoene.
In 1911, another skull was disinterred from the mass grave which researchers claimed was the real one. A long debate amongst academics, historians, medics and anthropologists about the identity of the skulls ensued.
So, naturally, they're digging up his relatives and plan to sample their DNA for a match.
I suppose it's a real advance when we go beyond testing live people who are purporting to be long-dead celebrities, against the live relatives, and move on to testing dead skeletons that people purport to be celebrities against dead relatives. How long can it be before we establish a catalog of dead celebrities' DNA profiles?
What would you do with the body of a Viking queen?
Norwegian scientists are digging her up for DNA testing:
SLAGEN, Norway - Archaeologists exhumed the body of a Viking queen on Monday, hoping to solve a riddle about whether a woman buried with her 1,200 years ago was a servant killed to be a companion into the afterlife.
As a less gruesome alternative, the two women in the grass-covered Oseberg mound in south Norway might be a royal mother and daughter who died of the same disease and were buried together in 834.
"We will do DNA tests to try to find out. I don't know of any Viking skeletons that have been analyzed as we plan to do," Egil Mikkelsen, director of Oslo's Museum of Cultural History, told Reuters at the graveside.
Well, it's a pretty trivial question for genetics. Here's a more interesting one: Assuming it's not her daughter, which woman is more genetically similar to living Norwegians? They may be digging up kings and queens all over Europe to answer that one...
If you knock, leave them an offering:
The archaeologists placed a Norwegian 20-crown coin - dated 2007 and with a picture of the prow of the Oseberg ship on one side - in the sarcophagus to show any future generations when the grave had been disturbed.
Admit it: if you were digging up a ninth-century grave and found a coin from 1653, it would freak you out! Maybe future archaeologists will just assume this is one of those early twenty-first century "natural" burials.
John Hawks Department of Anthropology
University of Wisconsin—Madison
Copyright © 2007 John Hawks