Graves tell archaeologists all sorts of things about a population and their culture. But what happens when there are no graves or skeletons?
In Herculaneum, a town wiped out by Mt. Vesuvius in 79 C.E. , there were very few skeletons found until the 1980s. The theory was that everyone had escaped the town before the eruption. When hundreds of skeletons were found in the boat sheds by the water (Fig. 1), the theory was obviously obsolete.
"Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence" as one of my anthropology professors from last year would say. In other words, just because there is no evidence now, it does not follow that there was none at one point. In the Pompeii example, just because the excavators didn't find skeletons, it did not mean that there were none. They just weren't looking in the right places.
This idea can also be applied to L'Anse aux Meadows, a Viking site in Newfoundland, where no skeletons have been found (Fig. 2). When I visited the site I was told that the Vikings had abandoned their settlement and returned home because there were no burials found. This always seemed too easy an answer for me.
What if we are looking in the wrong area as in Herculaneum? They could have been buried outside of the settlement or in an area we never considered. I don't know if the excavations included land penetrating sonar, but that could help identify unknown structures. What if the remains simply didn't preserve? What if they were buried in a way that didn't leave any archaeological remains in the first place? I don't know if there was any evidence of Viking burials at sea or cremation, but in a place like Newfoundland where the land can be frozen in the winter, couldn't it be a possibility? Also, many rich Viking graves preserved in the ground have the skeletons in boats; maybe this originated from a previous practice of sea burials. While I acknowledge I am speculating, I find it highly unlikely that none of the Vikings died while they were in Newfoundland.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
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