> “A sarcophagus containing a human body is not an archaeological object. These are human remains, and while examining the sarcophagus and analysing the body and other objects inside, we must do so with respect.”
When it is under a european cathedral it is a tomb to be respected. When it is under a african pyramid it is an archaeological site to be dug up and collected. That is not a new attitude, rather a very old one.
Strange how hawaiians care about these ancient burial grounds and we don't? Perhaps because the US has no connection to these ancestors while the hawaiians do?
Well, as this is under an actively used Catholic cathedral, and Catholics typically like to do our services on top of our saints, I imagine the clergy and the diocese has something to say as to how the bodies are treated.
Interestingly, always: a Catholic church contains an altar, the literal definition of which requires that it either contain or support the relics of saints. In other words, there are either bones in the altar or something which touched the body of a saint. Neat how the tradition had continued for so long. I wonder about how they manage to reliably source the material as well as to ensure its provenance. Supply chain is an issue everywhere!
Yes, indeed, there's always some portion of a saint (or something having touched a saint) in the altar, stemming from the early days of the Roman church when, during Roman persecutions, the church would hold Mass/Divine Liturgy over the bodies of martyrs in the catacombs.
However, most churches don't have full bodies anymore, for obvious reasons. However, when the altar is stripped (for example on Good Friday). If you were invited into the sanctuary... you would be able to see a stone, on which there is inscribed several crosses. Under each cross is a relic, set into the stone. The priest consecrates bread / wine over the stone.
In terms of provenance... you can't sell a relic, but most monasteries, shrines, the Vatican, or other places that have burial records, will provide relics upon request, if available. Orders keep careful details of their martyrs and saints. So for example, a Dominican parish will often ask a Dominican priory with burials of a Dominican saint for a relic. We have indeed even entered the modern age where some monasteries / priories / convents even let priests request relics online!
"We uncovered all these riches just 10-15cm under the floor slabs. It was completely unexpected."
They never did any scans? I remember being a kid and learning about how some old churches would entomb people directly under the floor (not catacombs).
It doesn't seem like the notre dame was the best curated cathedral based on my readings since the fire. The alarm system failed and was far from modern, actually very crude with the guard physically walking to where the fire was reported (which wasn't even where it was), vs it automatically calling the fire department and a specialized team directly and not some half asleep security guard on the night shift. The restoration team working on the roof at the time were all smoking cigarettes and investigators still haven't been able to rule out a mere cigarette causing the blaze. No sprinklers to speak of despite similar fires affecting similar buildings and causing similar billions in damage. No other preventative measures as far as i'm aware; other cathedrals have been covering their beams with fire retardant material. The state owns all the cathedrals but doesn't insure them, so restoration currently has been reliant on donors, and to me its still an open question if it will ever be completely restored as planned (since some donors have even backed out). The fact the building survived seems to be because firefighters guarded the towers and allowed the roof to burn itself out on top of the stone vault which contained it.
A cathedral is - among other things - a memorial to its builders. Changing the building is removing that function. Also, sprinklers may destroy more than they protect.
> The state owns all the cathedrals but doesn't insure them, so restoration currently has been reliant on donors,
This may be just me, but I find a rebuild-by-donations societally and spiritually a lot more meaningful than just some insurer and/or state handing over money. See also: Dresdner Frauenkirche [1]. It shows that society itself cares about the building, its history and cultural importance and spirituality.
Rebuild by donations is asking for the project to delay for decades. Look at La Sagrada Familia for enough evidence of how long it takes to construct a culturally significant cathedral using donations and no state support or private investment.
Maybe cathedrals are meant to take decades? Time spent that takes longer than a lifetime makes the building non-disposable, and it makes its builders understand they are working on something bigger than themselves. Consider that some took centuries to finish (looking at you, Cologne).
The state handing money means that some parts of the state ruling infrastructure consider the cathedral building to benefit a small part of society - the part that keeps the "representatives" in power. Especially in Europe, where church power has waned in the last decades, I don't think it's appropriate for a government that is supposed to also represent Muslims or Atheists or Buddhists to spend significant resources on the building of a cathedral.
That being said: as a non-christian German I gave a - to me significant - amount of money to the Notre Dame rebuild. I like the idea of helping build a piece of art that will survive me.
Yet here we see there really must be a need for insurance. If the building were insured, there wouldn't be a need for donations from around the globe to support its reconstruction. It would just be done out of policy. If the state was able to do this on their own and actually earmarked money in the budget to actually self insure this building, there wouldn't be a need for donations from around the globe. The state can't pay for it, which is why donations are required.
Fire protection =|= curration. As far as insurance goes, we are talking about a state, slef insurance can work pretty well in those cases.
The fire alarm system was acobbled together legacy system, no big surprise in a century old building. Thr number of cathedral fires, or similar fires in other hostorical buildings is negligible. In a sense Notre Dame served as a wake up call.
That was what irked many Canadians during the trucker tantrum. The nitwits intentionally walked and even pissed on the tomb of the Unknown Soldier in Ottawa.
It may also be "less completely unexpected" or "unexpected for legal reasons". I, knowing nothing, would assume that beneath any old cathedral floor is found something. But admitting that may be a much longer process than "accidentally discovering" it when work begins.
I'm not sure why it would be unexpected. Almost any Catholic cathedral of any import (even the new ones) bury people immediately underneath the floors. It's part of the planning of any church. It would have been even more common and less regulated in the times Notre Dame has seen.
Curious about this as well. There may be something, but I can't think of any technology that can penetrate stone, other than X-ray, and you need a detector on the other side to see the image...
So not sure it would have worked in that case. The statues where basically used to fill the space (mixed up with other things) when the wall (Jubé) they were on was removed on the 17th century (iirc).
There were some large (known) cavities around, which is the floor based heating system from the 19th century. The discoveries have been made below/around the heating system.
(The other known pieces of the Jubé, now at the Louvre, had afaik been discovered when the heating system was installed in the 19th century, so not a surprise we found more of them when searching the same area)
Hindsight is always 20/20, isn't it? I like those surprises so, theybare fun to read and show just how much stuff is still out there to be discovered in front of our noses.
This was the default method of burial in portugal up until the mid 1800s. There was actually a minor civil war as a result of the authorities stopping the practice.
Forgive my ignorance - genuinely curious if there might be a different way of thinking about this.
10-15cm underneath the floor seems so shallow that one would assume it would be picked up with such a scan. With that context, why shouldn't we assume a scan hadn't been performed?
I think the idea was that the people who would consider scanning recently might assume that someone scanned previously, based on the popularity of the site, and decide against it based on that.
Though I'd think you'd be able to verify an assumption like that.
It's pretty tough to verify such things. We don't make reliable records of the absence of something, and while someone at the church would probably know where the records of such a thing occurring were - it would take time to find that person. Not to mention its no ones job to verify assumptions on what things have/have not been done.
Which is a good reminder that many things we don't know about are because no one has ever bothered to try, or failing that, they haven't tried hard enough.
Not something I expected to read. A new attitude?