I mean, think about it! Most cultures set aside specific burial grounds and plots for their dead… which means that with billions of people having lived and died already we should be completely surrounded by cemetaries and graves all the time. I know that there must be a simple answer to this, but I just keep wondering about how there could have been so many people who lived at one time or another, how many many of them would have been ‘planted’ in their own little box with a marker, and how these untold millions if not billions of graves should be simply everywhere by this point.
I have that sneaky suspicion that this is a dumb question (the less gifted among us often do know when we are asking a dumb question), but I can’t think of an easy answer for it!
Different cultures have different was of disposing of their dead. However, the universality is that the bodies decompose. Throw a body in the ocean and the sea life will make it disappears within days. Burning a body reduces it to ash and a few bones. Animals dig up shallow remains, scatter what they don’t eat and Mother Nature does the rest.
Then there’s The Body Farm where forensic anthropology sheds light on this topic.
Hmm, let me think about the middling-sized town near to me…
Currently it’s got a population of about 10,000. If we assume 1/70th dies each year, that’s 143. For simplicity’s sake, we’ll allow for 43 cremations, body-never-found, private burial grounds, etc. That leaves us with, at 2x3m for a plot, an acre is being used every seven years. Allow for a population which has probably doubled since WW2 and risen fivefold in two centuries, it’s no surprise that the half-mile-square local cemetery, plus the several-acre older one, are not yet bursting at the seams. Prior to the population explosion of the 1800s, churchyards would have sufficed.
Sad to say, but cemetaries and graveyards get plowed up and bulldozed over all the time. remember that thread about Indian Burial Grounds, and the awful consequences of vioating them? well, we ought to be in a perpetual state of haunting from all the gravesites that are gone.
I recall seeing a drawing of apartments decorated with old tombstones. In the days of Nelson’s nabvy they used to raid cemetaries for sandstone tombstones, broken apart and used as scouring pads to scrub the decks – “holystones”, they were called. I have bno doubt that plenty of cemetaries have been unintentionally done in. Occasionally you dig one up by accident, and it gets preserved if it’s important. But there have been “decomissioned” cemetaries that have had the remains moved elsewhere.
Part of the Garden State Parkway in NJ bisects a cemetary – I’ll bet they actually cut through an existing cemetary, not that cemetaries grew up independently on both sides of the road.
Gravesites have often been reused. Remember the gravedigger’s scene in Hamlet? The gravediggers were making a new grave for Ophelia, and casting aside the bones already there, such as Yorick’s skull that Hamlet soliloquizes upon. There often existed charnel houses where the bones remaining from previous burials were stored.
There are vast catacombs under Paris consisting of stacks and stacks of bones from prior burials. You can see an entire wall, for example, made of femurs. Quite fascinating in a grotesque sort of way.
Also, unless they are maintained, cemeteries fall into disrepair. The writing (if any) on stone markers erode away, and they fall over. I’m willing to bet that most of the people who have ever been buried rest in burial plots that are no longer recognizable.
For a Boy Scout project, I once renovated a small century-old community cemetery in Tennessee. It was hardly recognizable as such. I cleared brush and cut back the overgrowth, but did not right any headstones for fear of causing more damage. After 25 years, unless someone else similarly maintained it, it would probably be difficult to find. Then, too, there may be a subdivision on top of it by now…
I used to visit my grandparents in Southern Oregon in the '70s. They lived, IIRC, 14.2 miles south of Applegate. A couple of miles down the road there was a very old, very small cemetery. Small trees were growing from the graves. The few headstones were barely reconnisable. I’ve often wondered how it looks today. Would I even be able to find it? Or has nature so completely disguised it that a search would be futile? Or has someone bought that little piece of land and built a home on it?
Years ago, I went on a “Cemetery Tour” of New Orleans. The tour guide show us stone burial vaults each about the size of a mortuary drawer, and each owned by a specific family. He said that after a body is put in one, the natural heat cremates it in a matter of a year or so. By the time the family has someone else to bury, the last person’s remains are ash and bits of bone, which are pushed to the back of the vault to make room for Granny.
In some European countries, the law is that you rent your burial plot (this is for people who like to be buried in their churchyards, still traditional in many places) for ten years. Then the spot is re-used for another person. Those churchyards are small, you know.
So I guess the answer is that we’ve been burying people on top of one another for a very long time, and plenty of others have just disappeared and been built upon.
You know, from playing around on Google Earth, I’ve been amazed at just how little of the earth actually has people on it. There’s a lot of land out there. Even if we could take every single human dead body of anyone who has ever lived, even under the assumption that they haven’t decomposed at all, and allowed them each an average sized burial plot, I wonder if they would take up a significant amount of land?
This has to be the most disturbing thing I’ve ever worked out:
Assuming a worldwide population of 6 billion and a reasonable 2m x 2m (6.56 x 6.56 foot) grave, you could bury the whole word in an area smaller than the area of New Hampshire* – which is a ridiculously small proportion of the planet’s land cover (less than 0.02%**). I know far more than 6 billion people have died over time, but it puts it into perspective. It basically boils down to the fact that the dead require a lot less space than the living.
6,000,000,000 people, 24,000,000,000 square metres to get that 2m x 2m = 9,266 square miles (Google even does square miles!) – New Hampshire is 9,283 square miles (including lakes, admittedly).
** 57,268,900 square miles of land, 100*(9,283/57,268,900) < 0.02
That’s the case in France, though you can rent the spot for various durations, ranging from I believe 5 years to “perpetuity” (which actually is 99 years). In large cities (like Paris) it might not be possible to rent it for the longest durations. In small villages, your grave can stay there essentially forever. It’s regulated by municipalities, that owns the cemeteries, according to the local needs.
The family can still renew the “rent”, but of course, after half a century, a lot of people don’t know and don’t care anymore about where Aunt Agatha was buried. So, the bones (if they’re left) are collected and buried in some collective grave and the plot get reused.
Many plots, though, are family vaults used by successive generations, when the family hasn’t moved elsewhere, rather than individual graves. When the vault is full, if the family is still using it, the “body is reduced”, which means that the bones of the oldest “residents” are collected in a small box put back in the vault in order to make room for the “newcomers”.
Also, in case it wouldn’t be clear, in a lot of soils, the bones too will naturally dissapear after some time. That’s why we aren’t digging up skeletons all the time.
The first thing you need to realise is that most cultures pacticed cremation up until fairly recently. It seems to have only been the advent of agriculture and the associated population rise and deforestation that led to widespread use burial. As a result it’s fairly rare to find bodies dating back more than 10, 000 years anywhere in the world.
The second point is that most cultures don’t have and never had specific burial plots. Bodies and cremated remians were commonly placed in caves, hollow logs, rivers and other natural features and left there. Not only does that practice lend itself to rapid decay, it also meant that the bodies were dispersed and that once the culture disintegrated the remains were no longer tended and rapidly became scattered. Most cultures don’t last more than a few thousand years in a solid enough form to maintain graveyards, so there simply won’t be that many bodies from more than a few thousand years ago.
Amongst those cultures that did practice burial you need to realise just how hard it is to dig a deep hole without iron tools. As a result burials for the common man, if they did occur, were usually in a scrape a foot or two deep, covered with a cairn of stones. Those sorts of burials don’t leave much long-lasting evidence, being close enough to the surface to get the air needed to decay.
Deep burial in a box is both a recent invention and mostly confined to the upper classes even then. Poor people were commonly buried shallow, wrapped in cloth and the bones disinterred after a few years and placed in a charnel house or similar. That’s why small European cemetaries, even church graveyards, have managed to remain functional for centuries. The bodies are rapidly cycled through, and at any givent time the oldest body is probably only 50 years old.
So you aren’t looking at billions of people planted in a box with a stone marker. Probably millions, maybe only hundreds of thousands. Even 10 million bodies will only occupy an area about 50 times the size of Central Park. That’s not much when you consider it is scattered across the entire surface of the planet.
One thing that always makes me roll my eyes when the WTC families say nothing can ever be built there again “because it’s a graveyard! It’s sacred!” is that most of New York - indeed most of all big cities - are built over graveyards. Bryant Park and Washington Square Park were graveyards as recently as the 19th century.
*All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.–Take the wings
Of morning–and the Barcan desert pierce,
Or lost thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregan, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings–yet–the dead are there,
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep–the dead reign there alone.-- *
IIRC, there are more people alive on the planet today than have ever lived and died. The real question is, what are we going to do with tomorrow’s dead people?
There was a burial crisis in London in 1850, and the cemeteries were literally overflowing. Bits of bones lying on the ground, that sort of thing. This was temporarily relieved by emergency legislation, and the legalisation of cremation in 1888.
And unless estimates are wrong, and the worlds population is not stabilizing, we’ll be doing with tomorrow’s dead people* what we’re doing with today’s. Recycle some old plots that no one have strong emotional ties to anymore.
*Strictly speaking “we” won’t be doing anything, since “we” are tomorrow’s dead.
