 Astrid and I are going to talk about what we prefer to call reopened graves, so that's basically graves that have been disturbed by human activity soon after burial, such as this early medieval example from France and this early Bronze Age example from Austria. So graves from, toponomically, graves from both areas are quite similar, so they are characterized by the interment of the complete body, soon after death, usually in a container, in a single grave cut in the ground. So traditionally this type of evidence is a talk attributed to grave robbery, so the plundering of graves for valuables, as understood today, but detailed research has been carried out recently in the early medieval period and has shown, so Astrid has carried out the regional study in France, then some also in the UK and Netherlands and Germany, regional studies have been carried out that show there is action patterns in object removal which point towards a more cultural practice. In the early Bronze Age such large-scale investigations are still missing, yeah, and to address, you know, to find out why the grave was reopened, the main questions you want to know is you have our, what was the original evidence, how did the original evidence look like, when did the reopening take place and what happened when the grave was reopened, so were human remains or objects removed, deposited, how have the human remains been treated, so that are all interesting questions and to understand all this it's particularly important to understand that are following me and in particular to also distinguish between human and natural factors, yeah, and in this talk we're going to talk about mainly archaeothanatology, micro morphology and also a bit of digital archaeology methods that we applied to research these graves and we will end with some recommendations for future excavations. Okay, so archaeothanatology, so as we have heard before is a study of the different biological and sociological aspects of that in ancient populations, so as many French physical anthropologists I have been trained in the method and so I decided to apply it to the specific case of early medieval reopen graves, so I would like to start my presentation with this grave from the site of Ilfurt in France as an example to show you what questions archaeothanatology can provide answers to, so this grave contains the remains of a malardered the first disturbance is located around the neck with the displacement of the cranium, mandible and some cervical vertebrae and the second disturbance that you can see concerns the left part of the skeleton from the forearm to the left femur and also includes the right tibia and fibula. This disturbances constants persistent articulation of the body, wow, so ones that we know today but which may change in the future as Clara and Elie have shown us, so what is persistent articulation? So it's articulations that are preserved longer during the decomposition process, so these elements are not one in connection anymore means that the body was in that case already reduced to skeleton stat or that the ligament attachments were already very weak at the time of the reopening, moreover the ways the bone are spread here so as you can see without no many damages and quite far indicates an intervention that occurred in an empty space which means that so this is what buried in a container and this container was still preserved when the disturbance happened, so the disturb bones are as you can see in the northeast corner of the grave and lie about 23 centimeters above the bottom the most likely theory here is that when the grave was reopened the bones were were deposited on the lid of the container which vanished afterwards the height of this container so 23 centimeters is consistent with what we can observe from other medieval coffins discovered in France for more or less the same period. The location of one disturbance sense and the study of pure practices at Ypres both suggests that an object placed around the neck of the body was removed and several elements fragments of iron artifacts have been discovered in the pelvis area which allow us to see that additionally a belt and a weapon were probably taken so through this very very quick presentation of this grave answers to at least four important questions could be changed a little bit as well, four important questions about the reopening having provided so what was the original appearance of the grave well as we see in emission in wooden container placed in the half of the rectangle appeared when was the reopening happened so before the decay and the collapse of the container but after the discomposition of the body so we think that maybe I feel like maybe it's target reopening for not only because of that but for many evidences and so my question is there is still surface marker visible at the time of the reopening what happened when the grave was reopened limited and target manipulation of specific areas of the skeleton so again sedated grave and no late by the opener of the continent of the grave so pendant bell weapon probably removed nobody for stake hands and the discussion here the disturbance on the neck is quite unusual in a man's grave in this particular site so what kind of pendant of color was there so I'm really wondering about maybe not just robbery but maybe something more symbolic yeah so so unfortunately the question about the roofing of the grave remains here open but it's not always the case so in some cases the continent of the feeling can provide information on this issue on the side of house also still in France now that's snares have been found in several reopened graves so the study carried out by a malachologist really that these snares belonging to spaces that were not going very deep inside I mean to solve so their presence in the feeling of these graves can only be explained if the reopening pit remained open after the disturbances and I think the examples too yeah I have similar evidence from early medieval Austria but I'm not going to talk about this but about a micro archaeological study that I carried out on a reopened early bronze age grave in Austria from a cemetery in this Austria what was found just to give an overview was a top mailing top individual on the top undisturbed male individual and then underneath a second male individual that was disturbed so here you can see the excavation process of the disturbed individual and as I said it's a micro archaeological was a micro archaeological approach so we did single finds recording that's even of all sediments and as you can see also taking micro morphology samples which can also I think before there was the the reasoning that you can't do the micro morphology because you have to leave a profile no you can also you know push them into the ground and this is actually a winner who did the micro morphology in this case study so yeah so we did then 3d modeling made a movie which reconstructed the excavation process micro morphology I've already mentioned yeah and then what I did in this case was to apply you know to extend the archaeological approach to also to disturb bones so I just described the disturb bones in the same way as you know according to the archaeological protocol and then put an undisturbed skeleton as a reference in the middle to reconstruct what happened so I got really quite a lot of data and I'm just going to do the most important ones now for the reopening question so yeah both individuals slipped into prone post semi-prone position deposition early position early yeah and from yeah an important result was from micro morphology we know that the pit that was stuck was actually originally much larger and it then slumped afterwards so it's actually different to what we saw at excavation then from from the archaeotonatology from extending this approach I got a really detailed picture of what happened so it was the first cranium and money will be put aside and then you know the person shifted or moved the bone to the side or to both sides but without and it was possible only by one person at a time but so this all this could be read as an attempt to actually not do any damage to the bone which is different to the revealing interpretation that these re-openings were done by enemies or that these were hostile acts so you could actually see that there was care taken not to damage the bones so which is an important result uh yeah objects were removed um then again from micro morphology we know that the grave was revealed immediately yeah and then the redeem world showed that actually there was a connection between the uneven positioning of the top individual with the uh subsiding of with the breakdown of the coffin underneath which was at odds with the c14 results so we had to reinterpret them and then also which also quite a nice result was that we could see that sandy layers from the micro morphology is formed from the decaying body in the in the coffin and until they reached a stable position until this broke down okay so we would like to conclude this presentation with suggestion on what we think is more important to facilitate analysis of grave disturbances so uh the ability to identify human activities depends strongly on the quality of the data collected in the field hence we propose adaptation of excavation methodologies and protocols for disturbed graves so are we probably say some uh obvious things but for some of you maybe it's not so let's see and so for example during excavation it is very important to make cross-section to be to understand the origin of the district and not only in the grave but also in the reopening pit if it's possible to really understand how it happened so the application of archaeology in the field is very important it's an important part of that because it provides significantly more information five recording forms need to be adapted to disturb graves i am really thinking in particular about the description of the disturbed bones not only the bones are still in place but the disturb ones too and in their location really the location and i'm also thinking about photographs please don't remove the disturbed bones for the photographs because it happens sometimes and we lose a lot of information because of that and additionally as we are seeing especially with edel that more advanced types of analysis are available that can contribute greatly where we want to get a more fine grained picture of what happened so i would say that the more precise we can be about the datting of the reopening the type of object removed the treatment of the body the closer we can get to the meaning of this fact and of course a better understanding of past societies thank you