The paper, since the Guardian didn't link to it. Facts: - three interlinked pits, indicating three burials, not one - ten individuals - disinterred in the '60s, not very carefully - age of the pits is unclear - Probably 10 people - 2 adult males - 2 adult females - 2 children under 4 - 1 child over 4 - 17 out of 134 bones burned - mostly skulls - sharp trauma isolated to upper torso - remains reburied - burials could be spread apart as much as 500 years - and then they rule out cannibalism for about 600 words and go immediately to fucking zombies. So let's be clear: this is around 10 skeletons' worth of bones, spread across who knows how many years, buried in a garbage pit, with burned skulls, from the height of the Age of Faith when defiling the corpse of the unbeliever was what you did when you really hated the next guy. I'd find a link but the first three fucking pages of Google results on "defilement of the dead" is this fucking article. I mean, the Norse did it, the Carolingians did it... up until the Age of Reason corpse defilement was basically "execution with prejudice" even if you leave out the standard practice of beheading the corpses of suicides. But boy howdy. You throw "zombies" into your fucking paper and you'll be on the Today show within 48 hours.The human remains that are the subject of the current study come from features comprising three intercutting, approximately square pits. This pit-complex consists of a central pit about 2.1 m wide, flanked to the east and west by two smaller ones each about 1 m wide. The depth of the westernmost pit was 0.3 m, the depth of the other two is not recorded. The central pit appears to be cut by the westernmost one but its relationship with the other is unclear. The pit complex lay immediately to the south-west of the long-house (which was 15th century in date), but predated its construction. During excavation, all remains were hand-recovered; there was no sieving to retrieve small bones. The pit-complex was not excavated stratigraphically, but rather numbers were assigned to finds trays as they entered post-excavation processing. The human remains were disarticulated when found and bear seven different finds numbers. These numbers show a relationship to the vertical or horizontal location within the pit-complex. However, upon examination of the skeletal remains, it became clear that conjoins existed between fragments bearing all seven finds codes. Therefore, for analytical purposes, the human remains are treated as a single group. The site report (Milne, 1979) noted that the pits contained a mixture of Roman and early Mediaeval pottery, and it is therefore likely that the fills represent reworked deposits.
In sum, the whole collection consists of 137 bones representing a minimum of 10 individuals: six full adults (two females, two probable males, two unsexed), one possible female who died in her late teens/early 20s (above enumerated with the adults), one subadult in their mid teens, one child aged about 2–4 and one aged about 3–4 years.
Sharp force tool marks were confined to the upper body parts and were particularly concentrated in the head/neck area. Some cut-marked bones also showed burning or perimortem breakage. Most sharp-force marks appear to have been made with a fine knife drawn across the bone. The only evidence for chop-marks was in the base of cranium A; given their location in the basal part of the occipital, it is likely that these injuries were inflicted upon a severed head. Indeed, the knife-marks at the occipital condyle and squama of this cranium may be associated with separation of the head from the vertebral column. The knife-marks on the mandibles are confined to the rami and are approximately transverse in orientation. Marks of this sort have been associated with disarticulation of the mandible in archaeological and anthropological cases of trophy heads (Tung, 2008 ; Bonney, 2014), and may be associated with efforts to remove the masseter muscle and other flesh from the cheek area (Kanetake et al., 2008). However, they may also occur as collateral damage in post-mortem decapitation using a knife (Reichs, 1998). Transverse cuts to the anterior aspect of cervical vertebrae have been identified in forensic cases of death by throat-cutting (Kimmerle & Baraybar, 2008: Fig. 6.4; Ozdemir et al., 2013). However, one of the cut-marked cervical vertebrae from Wharram Percy also shows more vertically orientated cuts on a transverse process, which would seem difficult to attribute to throat slitting, and horizontal and oblique knife marks have also been found in forensic cases where decapitation using a knife was part of post-mortem dismemberment of the corpse (Reichs, 1998).
The evidence for burning, cut marks and breakage in the perimortem period indicates that they are the product of more than one event rather than of a single episode of activity carried out on material of different ages. The lack of animal gnawing suggests that the bones were not exposed on the surface, but were curated or perhaps more likely, given the residual pottery found in the pit-complex, buried elsewhere before being deposited in the pit.
None has been shown to be contemporaneous with the churchyard burials (one is 7th century CE, two are undated (Richards, 1992: 84; Wrathmell, 1989: 15; Rahtz et al., 2004: 11–15)).
A revenant is a re-animated corpse that arises from its grave. Belief in revenants was widespread in Mediaeval northern and western Europe. Revenants were usually malevolent, spreading disease and physically assaulting the living (Gordon, 2014). Textual accounts of revenants in England are known from the 11th century onward (Blair, 2009), but they may represent more ancient folklore (Simpson, 2003).