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. :eek:
Perhaps the better question is this: what percentage of the earths surface should we say has had SOMEONE buried in it at SOME point? Why don’t we turn up bones in our gardens more often?
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.
When land prices go through the roof guess what land can get re-used? Especially if all the people and their relatives are long, long gone.
Remember that slave graveyard that was discovered in Manhatten when some construction digging was going on?
I remember 15 years ago when the Paso del Norte Hotel here started expanding by digging and unearthed skeletons. It turns out the old hotel was built on a graveyard used to bury Chinese (who worked for Southern Pacific) in the latter part of the 19th century.
