November 2017 Kickoff Lecture - Vampire Burials

Our kickoff lecture for this season's Winter Lecture Series was on November 14th at the Van Schaick Island Country Club. It's topic followed the Halloween mood with its focus on mortuary archaeology titled "Vampire Burials".

Presented by the museum's director, there was - of course - an issue with the microphone. Not sure what jinx I have regarding microphones, but this was the third talk I've given where I had to improvise. Our vice president picking it up at the end of the talk to poke around with it, only to have it work fine was just another clue that I may be jinxed...sigh....



But I want to thank everyone who came out to join us for the kickoff! You were great despite my technical difficulties.

Exploring some of the history and features of the vampire creature in various European cultures and mythologies, we focused on examples of deviant burials in the archaeological record that were strange enough to warrant the interpretation by the excavating archaeologists as having possibly belonged to individuals who were thought to be in danger of - or were already - these undead figures.

What is mortuary archaeology? As you can probably guess from the name, it's archaeology that focuses on the mortuary aspects of a culture, left behind in things like graves/tombs, funerary artifacts, and of course, the body itself. Studying how a society handled the treatment of their dead can tell you a lot about their culture.

But, as was stressed in the lecture, archaeology is an interpretation of findings. Yes, a lot of it has strong evidence to support it and forensic anthropology is a key feature in creating these interpretations of the past. But, then you have items where even the standard "it's ceremonial" is tossed out when archaeologists are left shrugging a bit.

There are a plethora of features associated with vampires and an accompanying variety of methods to deal with them. The majority of examples looked at in this lecture were from the early modern period (~1450 - 1690), but there are cases that suggest even ancient sites like the Iron Age example from Italy were on the lookout for potential vampires.

We looked at examples of these burials spanning from the British Isles, Scandinavian countries, eastern Europe, the Mediterranean, and into America in the mid-1800s during an outbreak of consumption (aka tuberculosis).

An example from Poland of a "vampire burial"

Scandinavian examples from folklore include creatures like this image -
       although the features and definition of this particular "vampire" changed
                                       over time to be more of a drowned vengeance-seeking creature preying on the living rather than the typical blood-drinking image most commonly associated with the figure of the vampire

We couldn't not explore anything from the place everyone thinks of when you hear the word
vampire. Romania is one of the few places where the vampire is so closely linked to what outsiders view of their culture that I had to look to see if there were any other potential cases of people having been treated for vampirism post-mortem. You can click on this link from the PBS series, Secrets of the Dead where they document a case from 2004.

And so, in some places, the vampire hunt continues!

Just keep this in mind in case you find yourself in a situation with such a creature: