In America today, we tend to think of graveyards as permanent: once someone is buried, that’s where they’re going to stay. This really wasn’t the case even in the relatively recent past. Especially in urban areas were burial space was at a premium, a grave wasn’t a final resting place, so much as a convenient location to let a body rot. Afterwards the bones would be disinterred and moved to a more permanent area such as a charnel house or ossuary, which are structures devoted to this task. Ranging from modest to immense, these can contain either unsorted bones from newly excavated graves or intricate, carefully stacked piles. Below is an example of exhumed skulls I saw at a church in Poznan, Poland. The second image is one I took at a larger, more orderly ossuary I visited in Sedlec in the Czech Republic.


In other cases, new graves would simply be cut into the ground on top of older ones. I took the image below at a medieval burial site in Poland that I helped to excavate. In it, you can clearly see how a child’s grave was dug into a preexisting adult grave. In the process, the rest of the remains were simply cast aside, and the few remaining adult bones in the picture were all that were found.