"dried precipitate of liquified soft tissue...and condensation". Yeah - mud.

'Coffin liquor' may be the most disgusting pair of words I've ever read, and I've been on the internet a while. Wow.

I was reading the article looking for mentions of some analysis that this might allow. Perhaps all that archaeology does with this material is to sift it for objects.

Sounds like dirt to me.

I wish someone would do the math, it feels like a human body wouldn’t leave that much remains after degrading. I remember learning in the cemetery tour at New Orleans that those above ground tombs are family tombs and that they contain generations of people. The top shelf is where the body goes and it stays for one year and degrades before it is opened again and scraped into the bottom layer where multiple generations dwell forever together.

https://historyinstone.blogspot.com/2019/07/above-ground-bur...

It's made of limestone, which is quite porous. Should be plenty of air exchange over the last 1700 years.

(And they may have done so before opening. It probably wouldn't be mentioned in an article like this.)

Where does it say that they didn't?

If nothing else, a time capsule of bacteria present...

there is an urn inside, that seems unbroken, there may be a sample in there.

While the article does not mention it, chances are that the sarcophagus was found during doing the soilwork for modern construction. In which case the construction company is obliged to report that to the ministry in charge and then the excavation can be done with proper care. If there was not a law for that we wouldn't talk about grave robbing but grave destroying instead.

It sells newspapers unfortunately. For the longest time newspapers (and by extension much of the general public) equat archaeology with treasure hunting.

I don't know the circumstances of this dig, but it may have been a rescue dig ahead of eg massive concrete foundations going in. In many countries this is what drives (and funds) fieldwork.

Yes. “Unlooted and unopened”… until today.

There's a bit done by a comedian where they ask what the differences are between grave robbers and archaeologists, but basically it boils down to a question of time.

Taking all the tokens people gave the deceased for their afterlife journey sounds like highway robbery.

What's the difference between archeology and grave robbing. Just time.

Obviously?

limestone is porous and will allow water to eventually seep through.

a condensation cycle will occur, and drip percolate the soft tissue and adipocere into a slurry [coffin liquor] that will settle to the bottom of the sarcophagus.

>III century CE

IV century CE

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The treatment archeological finds get today is downright religious compared "that's a damn good stone, we'll use that stone for a lintel, chuck the skeleton in the river" that would've happened prior to the modern era.

>It feels like a kind of end of civilization or even humanity type of thing, where at some point all of the earth will have been excavated and all human evidence will have been removed and catalogued and archived in some warehouse, totally sanitizing sterilizing the planet of human activity.

Well, no, because as you've said, the evidence will be in warehouses, and then at some later time also buried. The practice of human archeology is as much a part of culture that the future may study as the cultures that it itself studies.

>it is after all objectively desecration of burials

What do you mean "objectively desecration"? Whether something is sacred or not is purely a matter of opinion. "Objectively" it's just some configuration of atoms being moved from one place to another, neither action inherently having any more meaning or specialness than the other.

>that were never meant to be dug up to satisfy the curiosity and career of some rather selfish and increasingly irreligious academic.

Who cares what the intent was? The people who put it in the ground are dead, and so are their children, and their children. The only living people who care are the ones digging it up.

>Think about it, very little of today will be of value if it survives at all.

That's what you think because you're alive now to experience it. It's worthless to you because it's abundant. Someone a million years from now may see your PC and that sarcophagus as equally priceless artifacts, because both points in time will be roughly equally distant.

>It feels like a kind of end of civilization or even humanity type of thing, where at some point all of the earth will have been excavated and all human evidence will have been removed and catalogued and archived in some warehouse, totally sanitizing sterilizing the planet of human activity.

My understanding is that most countries prevent areas from being wholesale dug up, but only permit smaller, limited digs for this reason. So a representative sample of a site can be reexamined at a future date with future technology to reassess understanding. Some sites have had many many digs in this fashion, and still havent dug the entire site. In fact its a criticism of some semi famous sites, usually from charlatans, that the entire site hasnt been dug therefore we are leaving evidence of their popular wackjob ideas in the ground

>because there is very little of anything physical that remains.

I dont know thats true. Lots of what we do is kept and recorded. And our activity surely leaves traces. Plastics especially.

>My understanding is that outside of specific medium, none of the data we generate or consume will last, let alone survive something like a nuclear war or even a massive solar flair.

I dont believe this is true either. We arent backing our society up to a single old spinning disk. We have documents that immediately predate data storage. We have old documents stored in multiple places. We have lost certain specific artefacts of our own history but it seems doomerish to assume thats what happens universally.

1. A lot of archaeology is "rescue" archaeology. i.e. Either natural processes (e.g. rivers shifting) have threatened a site or the decision has been made to build, but there is a legal requirement to have the site surveyed and dug (if warranted). If you have an issue with this, then it must be with rivers shifting or people building. Rescue archaeology merely rescues the past from otherwise certain destruction.

2. Archaeologists are keenly aware that digging is a destructive act. There are countless examples of sites that were dug with unsophisticated techniques (e.g. bulldozers and dynamite) in the past that could have taught us far more were they dug with even slightly more modern (and careful) techniques. This is why, outside of rescue archaeology, excavations are done with careful deliberation. It's also standard practice to excavate sites only partially, leaving some of it intact for future archaeologists to dig with more advanced technology and techniques.

3. Rest assured, there yet remains vast quantities of history buried in the ground, waiting to be discovered. e.g. We have discovered cuneiform records referring to entire cities that remain buried and unknown. Other cities of the past are under modern settlements and are, at present, mostly inaccessible to archaeologists. It may seem like the world has been exhaustively explored, but there are still huge surprises waiting underground.

Maybe there were advanced human civilizations on the planet before the current (there are such theories), but at some point they also got so advanced that they accidentally/systematically removed all of their traces, and have declined in some way. (though the theories are have better explanation for their lack of artifacts apart from a few OOPARTs)

Our age unfortunately will have long-lasting traces in the forms of various plastics and forever-chemicals.

There is 7+ billion people now on the planet. Don't worry our descendants will find our stuff for a long time. In 10.000 years they won't care that much if something was from 300.A.C or 2025.A.C.

>catalogued and archived in some warehouse

"We have top men working on the Ark right now."

> we dig up and remove artifacts whenever and wherever we find them

Not anymore, at leats not everywhere. AFAIK there is a stop to excavations of unexplored areas in Pompei. There are several burial sites of kings and emperors in Korea and China that are intentionally left unexcavated (they excavated a few mounds, but left the rest as it is).

[dead]

What would the people who sealed the grave do when they accidentally unearthed a sophisticated burial site from the middle bronze age? Leave it alone? Maybe. I'm not sure, humans are curious.

Well the effort and care put into the grave made us - 2000 years later in cyberspace - in a sense remember the person. Who was this young woman? They even gave us hints/rewards. Made us curious.

So maybe they prepared her for an afterlife ... of continued memory and presence among the living, which they with their technological limitations succeeded in, we are talking about her, now.

And open a grave a third day, and you're just an ordinary grave digger, reusing the cemetery land.