See subjects. The dug-up knight/King thread prompted them.
My guess for the first question is Auschwitz (Oswiecim), Poland.
The second question: some oil shale.
Yeah, or limestone or something like that.
What sort of ‘area’ are you talking about for the first question though? If you crop to a really small massed grave, that would be a winner, but if you’re looking for, say, a 1 square mile area with the greatest number of human dead, the answer will probably be different (maybe the riverbed of part of the Ganges?)
Makli Hill necropolis has to be in the running.
Oil shale (or what ever oil trap) is just where your hydrocarbons migrated and accumulated. Come to think of it, I never heard of a record great dying of animals (non-predatory.) The Chixulub was likely a slow death. Faster killers would be the immediate vicinity of a volcanic eruption or a tsunami.
#1 Auschwitz (assuming it’s true)
runners up are Stalingrad, Leningrad, site of the first battle of the Somme.
Auschwitz saw a lot of dead over a short time. I’d expect a place that’s had a high population density for a very, very long time: places like Rome, Beijing, or Makli Hill (a large and very ancient cementery near Karachi, for those who like me hadn’t heard of it).
A million people died in Auzwitch. Calvery Cemetery in New York alone as 3 million plots. So its seems pretty plain that the answer would be some city that has had a large population, rather then a place like Auswitz or Stalingrad that were the locations of a single disaster.
Colma, CA averages out to have about 1 million buried people per mi². Is that up among the highest densities?
Suggestion to the OP: qualify #1 as to whether it was biocenosis (like Auschwitz), or thanatocenosis (like Calvery Cemetery.)
Soon as I wake up more I’ll look those words up and get back to you. Also, Colma, Ca.?
Wait - are we talking about the number of deaths, or the number of dead bodies? If the latter, Auschwitz may be out of the running - weren’t most of the bodies incinerated?
Non-human deaths: areas of thick limestone? Isn’t limestone made of trillions of shells of tiny underwater creatures?
Assuming what’s true?
I think Behesht Zahra Martyrs’ Cemetery in Tehran, Iran is in the running.
I recall some newsreel or german footage of cleaning up at one of th concentration camps. Although they tried to burn the bodies, toward the end of the war I assume fuel was scarce. The footage showed bodies being dumped in the mass graves, which looked like they were 10 to 15 feet deep and then filled with bodies. (Acording to a survivor, in the winter the ground would bubble with the gases coming off the decomposing bodies.) the Germans had prisoners carrying th bodies or using wheelbarows, when the Americans arrived(?) they were using buldozers to cover and bury the bodies.
I think the documentary film was called something like “Brown and Tan” after the German uniforms, but I haven’t seen any references to it, I assume it was just one of many documentaries. I mean, I have a high tolerance for Hollywood gore and it often makes me laugh, but this was the real deal and when I saw it in high school, it was one of the few time I felt like puking just from watching a movie.
So based on depth and quantity, a German concentration camp might qualify, depending on how big an area you want to include. Any mass grave where the bodies are iled on 10 feet deep would be a contender. What a mordbid subject.
If instead we’re talking long-term, then any city like Rome or Cairo or Xi’an where the population has been huge for historically long times. After all, if a city is pushing hundreds of thousands in population for centuries or millenia and most of them died in the city, they must be buried close to walking distance…
I’m surprised nobody has mentioned the catacombs of Paris. After the revolution, the government set out to empty the (unhealthy) graveyards in city limits. All the bodies were dug up and moved to the mines south of the city, where the limestone blocks for some of its great buildings were mined. You can walk through this, about a kilometer of galleries where the bones are piled 8 feet high and go back 10 to 20 feet, behind walls of neatly stacked thighbones. (When I saw this about 10 years ago, there was a skull sitting out on the guard’s desk. I assume they caught someone trying to walk out with it…)
One of the older River Valley Civilizations.
On the Indus, the Nile, the Euphrates, the Xi Jiang. High populations, over a long period of time.
Maybe it was for demonstration purposes about what not to do “for instance, don’t take a skull and place it on your desk like this…”
[hijack]once I went to a fairly small show cave and in the beginning the tour guide told us about not touching the stalactites because they could break off since they grew back so slowly. And to emphasize this point, he scraped the ceiling with his hand, scraping off dozens of little baby stalactites off the ceiling :smack:
Hmmm … just in case of zombie apocalypse, I’d really rather know where the*** least ***number of dead per mile is. :eek: