Scientists discover unique ‘zombie grave’ in Germany designed to keep a person underground after resurrection

“It must be assumed that the stone was placed there for a specific reason. Possibly to keep the dead person in the grave and prevent him from coming back,” the museum wrote in a Facebook post.

According to Newsweek, people living in the region at the time were known to be afraid of “revenants,” that is, reanimated spirits or bodies believed to have returned from the dead.

Susanne Friederich, project manager of the excavations and scientist at the State Office for Monument Preservation and Archaeology of Saxony-Anhalt, explained to the magazine that the peoples of antiquity tried to keep revenants away through magic.

“Back then, people believed that dead people sometimes tried to free themselves from their graves. Sometimes the dead were laid on their stomachs. When the dead person is lying on their stomach, they dig themselves deeper and deeper instead of coming to the surface,” she told the outlet.

These graves have been nicknamed “zombie graves” and this particular individual, who was between 40 and 60 years old when he died, was buried without any cultural relics for the afterlife.

The site is not the first zombie grave discovered in Europe in recent years.

A 2020 study published in Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports described the case of a man buried in a sitting position with half of his body exposed. This led scholars to investigate the possibility that he had been buried in a way that would prevent him from moving should he rise from the dead.

Rafael Garrido Pena, a prehistoric archaeologist at the Autonomous University of Madrid in Spain, told the online publication Atlas Obscura that Neolithic Europeans believed that a person was only truly dead and therefore dangerous when his flesh had decayed and only the skeleton remained.

Pena told the news agency that there were examples of Neolithic cultures exhuming bodies that had not yet fully decomposed and transferring them to safer graves, where they theoretically posed less of a threat.

Due to the position of his body during burial, archaeologists do not assume that the man was exhumed and transported in Germany.

However, there are alternative explanations for the unique burial in Germany, such as an execution or other cultural motives. Scientists have not yet fully investigated the site, but fear of zombies is definitely a possibility for the unique burial.

Archaeologists believe the grave belonged to someone from the Bell Beaker culture, which was widespread throughout Europe and lived from 2800 to 1800 BC. The Bell Beaker culture owes its name to the drinking vessel, which resembled an upside-down bell.

During the development of the Bell Beaker culture, the culture was characterized by complicated economic and cultural exchange processes, the mining of gold and copper, and even the development of archery.