An archaeological dig near Venicehas unearthed the 16th-century remains of a woman with a brick stuckbetween her jaws — evidence, experts say, that she was believed to be avampire.
The unusual burial is thought to be the result of an ancientvampire-slaying ritual. It suggests the legend of the mythicalbloodsucking creatures was tied to medieval ignorance of how diseasesspread and what happens to bodies after death, experts said.
Thewell-preserved skeleton was found in 2006 on the Lazzaretto Nuovoisland, 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 believedthey did,” said Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist andanthropologist at Florence University who studied the case over thelast two years. “For the first time we have found evidence of anexorcism 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 graveswere often reopened to bury fresh corpses and diggers would chance uponolder bodies that were bloated, with blood seeping out of their mouthand with an inexplicable hole in the shroud used to cover their face.
“Thesecharacteristics are all tied to the decomposition of bodies,” Borrinisaid. “But they saw a fat, dead person, full of blood and with a holein the shroud, so they would say: ‘This guy is alive, he’s drinkingblood and eating his shroud.'”
Modern forensicscience shows the bloating is caused by a buildup of gases, while fluidseeping from the mouth is pushed up by decomposing organs, Borrinisaid. The shroud would have been consumed by bacteria found in themouth area, he said.
At the time however, whatpassed for scientific texts taught that “shroud-eaters” were vampireswho fed on the cloth and cast a spell that would spread the plague inorder to increase their ranks.
To kill theundead creatures, the stake-in-the-heart method popularized by laterliterature was not enough: A stone or brick had to be forced into thevampire’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.
Muchlater, someone jammed the brick into her mouth when the grave wasreopened. Borrini said that marks and breaks left by blunt instrumentson several among more than 100 skeletons found by the archaeologistsshow that the grave was reused in a later epidemic.
Sucha reconstruction of events is plausible, as is the link to thesuperstitions about “shroud-eaters,” said Piero Mannucci, the vicepresident 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.
Theanthropologist, who did not take part in Borrini’s research, said thatat a time when bacteria were unknown, such superstitions were a way forthe terrified population to explain the waves of plague epidemics thatkilled 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.”
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090313/ap_on_sc/eu_italy_vampire_of_venice