In small countries in Europe like England or even smaller like Luxembourg, millions of people must have died through the two thousand years since civilization has been around.
So are those countries in danger of being one huge cemetary eventually?
You can’t seem to build a building in London without finding ancient bodies, which I quite like, being a bit of a history fan.
Though now I think that most people choose to be cremated so there won’t be so much of a problem in the future.
I once read a story about the situation in Spain, a mostly Catholic country, where most people choose to be buried. It seems they’re running out of space so after your funeral you’re buried and in something like 5 years you’re dug up again and crushed up into dust thus leaving another spot for the next corpse.
The same is true for Egypt I remember reading an article about how it always takes so long to get a road built in Egypt becuase the road crews keep getting held up by finding tombs everywhere; And whenever they do, they have to stop construction so researchers can study the area; its a law there.
here is a thread discussing the same issues and how they are solving the problem
I tell you, my basement’s getting full.
You’d be surprised at how many graveyards are lost. A few years ago they tore up the roads in Annapolis Maryland and found an old potters field that no one even knew was there.
Now Annapolis is only about 300 years old, just think about how many lost graveyards there are in older cities.
IIRC, you won’t find many cemeteries in Japan, where due to space limitations something like 98% (?) of people are cremated.
The Catacombs of Paris were a huge 18th-century public works project intended to empty out the overflowing cemeteries around the city. The remains of an estimated 17 million people stored in caverns carved out of the limestone underlying the city, neatly stacked in alternating layers of skulls and limbs. Definitely an, er, unusual tourist attraction.
Would they be the ones used in the movie, ‘Interview with a vampire’?
Ya know, I have wondered about a similar subject before, only on a global scale, considering that untold billions have been and gone before us and having also noticed that it seems one cannot dig a hole for a plant in Egypt without uncovering a mummy. I recall the records where, ages ago, when the British were there, dead bodies in the form of mummies were so numerous that they were often used to fuel steam engines for trains, shipped all over as conversation pieces in well to do homes in both Britain and America and so many went into colleges and such that they were treated just as objects. Many were just lost or eventually tossed out.
With especially the Christian and Jewish propensity to have to be buried in the dirt, taking the resurrection very, and possibly too, literally, I figure cemeteries are going to consume an awful lot of land real soon. We should be knee deep in bones if it were not for the natural tendency for most bodies to turn into mulch when buried and I’ve seen pictures of these ossuaries all over the world and find them gross. Like that Catholic Church decorated with human bones and those catacombs with dismembered bodies stacked neatly, yards thick, along the walls. (* By the way, how does that fit in with resurrection? If everyone does arise at the end of the world, those folks are going to have to dig through each other in order to find their pieces and the ones glued to the church walls and ceilings might have a bit of a problem also. Fragmenting the old bones doesn’t seem to bother those who feel they must be buried whole to rise again sometime.*)
Did they not find some great and vast necropolis somewhere under a major city in Turkey, covering miles, right at one end of a new traffic bridge they are building? I recall reading about how the archeologists have managed to delay the construction, but are disappointed that soon, the place will be dynamighted and sealed for the road foundation.
Can they ever have enough bones? Can’t they enter this huge bonery someplace else?
I always get a kick out of it when some huge burial ground, forgotten for eons, is discovered out in some dessert and archeologists get upset that poor locals are pillaging it. They call them looters, but with so many old burial grounds showing up these days, just show sacred are they to be? In the not too distant past, when they were tossing the mummies of the average Egyptian flunky into the fire box of trains, they were also grinding them up for fertilizer and patent medication.
Freed up a lot of land, did it not?
Cremation is cleaner, better and uses much less land. Besides, I don’t know about you, but I certainly don’t want stacks of thousands of bones around my neighborhood in some church basement or ossuary because the sacred grave yard is over flowing. To me, the bones are cast off shells, like crustaceans have, their usefulness is over and the previous owners have gone on. If we preserve them all, eventually Earth will be covered in a layer of bones several feet thick, all over the place.
Then where will we grow the flowers?
In the good old days, “Charnel houses” were common in Europe-- after you had your number of years in the ground, you would be dug up and your remaining bits (bones) gathered together with all the other bones inside.
The Jewish cemetary in Prague is neat, too-- When necessary they would bring in an extra stratum of new dirt and bury another level of people, bringing all the memorial stones to the surface, so it is a very crowded ground space, representing the stones of 3 or so levels of people (and now the “ground level” within the walls of the yard are 15 feet or so above street level).
I once heard (sorry, no cite) that more people are alive now than have ever lived. If you’ve ever seen population charts going back 200 years or so, you can see the exponential population growth back the last 150 years or so and imagine that this is true. This means that there are fewer than 6 billion bodies buried (probably much fewer as many bodies were probably decomposed in situ.
Study New Orleans. The ground is so swampy, bodies can’t be planted 'cause you’d hit water. People are “buried” in mauseleums (sp?). After a few years in that concrete oven, the bodies pretty much dessicate and are pushed back into a small pit behind the slap to make room for the next body. Saw it on a walking tour while there. (sorry for the crappy description.)
Not quite. It was simply the result of a major urban revitalisation program. I have always been told that it was Napoleon III (lived 1808-73 emperor 1852-70), who employed Haussmann to revamp the city. He decided that it was cool with big roundabouts (eg place de la concorde) with big roads radiating outwards like spokes. Unfortunatelly there were already houses, churches and graveyards where he wanted to have his boulevards. The houses were simply razed, but it the graveyards were emptied and the contents neatly stacked inthe preexisting tunnels under the city. The tunnels originated as mines where they dug out limestone to build houses. (Parts of the catacombs date to roman times). The subterrenean Paris is hollow like a (n American) Swiss cheese; one of the reasons why the latest underground, RER, was built so deep.
This was addressed by Cecil himself.
quoting from How many people have lived on earth since the dawn of time?
(Some references in the thread More Alive than Dead, Huh?)
TC, you’re right, as far as it goes, but transfer of bodies to the Paris catacombs began well before Haussmann’s urban renewal project. Some were used as far back as the middle ages, but as an a official city project, this site says:
“Catacombes established by order of Monsieur Thiroux de Crosne, Lt. General of Police, and by Monsieur Guillaumot, Inspector General of Quarries, 1786. Restored and improved by order of Monsieur Frochot, Secretary of State, Chief of the Department of the Seine, by Monsieur Hericart de Thury, Chief Mining Engineer, Inspector General of Quarries, 1810.”
In any event, the scale of the underground passageways around Paris is truly staggering.
BTW, I should have said the remains of about seven million people, not 17 million. My bad.
thanks, tc, I feel smarter already!
I believe the graveyard expiration date is 1000 years. If you stay buried for that long, you become “an artifact.”
Heh heh heh, you said “huge bonery.”
RE: This quote;
Considering the no doubt varying birth rates, any such figures of previous populations must have a huge variance because huge families were most common pre-1900s, usually sired to create free labor on the farm and defense against others. Plus no one has any real idea of just how dense the populations of prehistoric man was.
An indicator, is signs of war. When a population gets dense enough in any given area, some form of warfare usually develops. When you start finding chopped up bodies in the ground, then you have to figure that the local population was over several thousand. Then you have to start figuring in the genetic differences because too small a population generates an increase in inherited defects, increased infant mortality, and a lower number of long lived elders. Consider also whether or not the population was mobile or fixed in relation to the land, if the land had once been lush or arid, what the weather conditions were, the estimated amount and types of easily killed game, materials for shelter and so on.
In my opinion, any estimate of the total past populations has to consist of a real wide margin for error.
Better estimates would come from the creation of record keeping and high density populations.
Andy, do you have a cite for that? I’m not disputing you, I’d just like to read about it.
I’ll see what I can find, too.