Burial place of a vampire of a fifth century Italy 5th century Italy child discovered in Lugnano

Researchers believe that the child died of malaria in the fifth century (David Pickel / Stanford University)

"We know that this type of unusual treatment usually indicates a fear of the undead, especially a fear that the dead will return from the grave to continue spreading diseases to the living. . . Placing the stone in the child's mouth is a literal or symbolic way to invalidate it, "said Jordan Wilson, bioarchaeologist and PhD student at the University of Arizona, a member of the team that unearthed left over during the summer.

This discovery is the latest among dozens of remains found at La Necropoli dei Bambini, or the cemetery of babies, an abandoned Roman villa that was transformed into a huge children's cemetery in the middle of the fifth century. A community that was about to separate paganism and Christianity – horrified by deaths they could not explain – resorted to witchcraft and buried their children by ritual means, said David Soren, professor at the University of Arizona Regents, which has overseen archaeological excavations conducted at site over the last three decades.

These discoveries offer a glimpse of society terrorized by a deadly and unknown disease. Archaeologists say that this may have paved the way for the end of the Roman Empire and even prevented the barbaric ruler Attila the Hun from completing his invasion of Italy.

"It's probably a situation in which you do not know what's going on, you have no idea. . . where you try almost everything in desperation and listening to anyone who can find an answer, "said Soren." It's really really strange. "

Soren said he discovered the burial site in 1987 when he was working on a different project on the island of Cyprus and was invited to visit Lugnano, in the Italian region of Umbria – the center of the Sorcery of Roman Empire. There he saw what was left of the villa, about the size of a modern shopping center. They found remains of what had been a pyramid-shaped dining room, slave quarters, a sloping ceiling on four sides, paintings and wall mosaics. In the earth-covered trenches were the remains of infants, toddlers and aborted fetuses buried along raven talons, toad bones, bronze cauldrons filled with ashes and sacrificial puppies.

Archaeologists call these "deviant burials", or the ancient burial method of people who feared to have supernatural abilities like coming back from death, or those who violated the company's rules, Wilson said.

"They sprinkled honeysuckle everywhere," Soren said. "There are all these magical rites happening around that, which makes this cemetery so fascinating."

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Soren and his team of archaeologists have since searched 51 remains of children who have proven by biomolecular tests the deaths due to malaria and fetuses who would have been sentenced with the disease before birth. The oldest child to date is the 10-year-old, whose discovery was announced last week. The researchers did not do any further analysis to determine whether the child had died of malaria, but evidence of a tooth abscess, a side effect of the disease, suggested that this was the case.

Near the grave of the child was the body of a 3 year old girl, say archaeologists. His hands and feet had been weighed down by stones – another form of vampire burial to ward off evil. She too had died of malaria.

The urbanized Roman empire was a cesspool of diseases that spread through contaminated food and water. The marshes were a refuge for mosquitoes, creating an environment conducive to malaria that would not have been discovered until the 19th century.

Lugnano is not the only burial site for vampires. In Venice, in northern Italy, an elderly woman of the sixteenth century, buried with a brick in her mouth and discovered in 2009, had been dubbed the "vampire of Venice". In Northamptonshire, England, about one hundred and twenty kilometers north of London, from the third or fourth century was found last year, a stone was laid where his tongue was.

After death, a stone was deliberately inserted into the child's mouth to prevent the child from resuscitating. (David Pickel / Stanford University)

But beyond these strange discoveries, there were human beings who lived in fear, Wilson said.

"It was something I thought about a lot while we were working on this project. It seems that when humans face the unknown, it's a widespread reaction in our story to react with fear, "Wilson said. "I am deeply in love with this community that was facing this epidemic when they did not understand it."

And in the midst of this fear were the children who had died of pain.

"It's nice to remember that when you find something like that, it's a real person who has suffered and left a family," said Wilson. "As exciting as it may be for us to find something like this and look at it from a scientific point of view, it's important not to forget either the humanity of the situation."

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