Researchers have reconstructed the face of a 16th-century Italian woman, whose burial style indicated that she was believed to be a vampire, according to an upcoming academic article to be published on Monday.
The research, published in Cicero Moraes’s book The Facial Close-up of the “Vampira” from Venice, found that the woman was around 60 years old when she was buried.
Buried in a mass grave for medieval plague victims in Venice, researchers were intrigued by her body when they discovered her in 2006 with a brick placed in her mouth. The brick had been placed before she was entombed.
It was theorized that the brick had been placed to prevent the ‘vampire’ woman from feasting on the dead bodies of plague victims buried alongside her.
“When they supposedly identified a vampire, one of those responsible for the plague according to popular myth at the time, they introduced the stone [brick] as a protective element, preventing it from feeding and also from infecting other people,” forensic researcher Moraes told South West News Service.
3D designer Moraes recreated the woman’s features by using scans of the remains and historical data.
Vampires in Europe
The practice of placing a brick in the mouth of a ‘vampire’ is connected with the paranoia experienced by Europe during the outbreak of the bubonic plague.
The idea the woman had been treated this way over fears she was a vampire had been introduced by a 2009 analysis by John Moores University forensic anthropologist Matteo Borrini.
With little knowledge of the decomposition of bodies, grave robbers would often come by bodies with their teeth seemingly bared as a result of bacteria in the mouth. This left the robbers with the belief that the bodies had been eaten.
Borrini told Reuters that his research was “the first time that archaeology has succeeded in reconstructing the ritual of exorcism of a vampire.”
“To kill the vampire, you had to remove the shroud from its mouth, which was its food like the milk of a child, and put something uneatable in there,” said Borrini. “It’s possible that other corpses have been found with bricks in their mouths, but this is the first time the ritual has been recognized.”
“Studies indicated that the skull belonged to a woman of European ancestry, who died around 61 (±5) years of age, belonged to the lower class, and ate mainly grains and vegetables,” the research found.
“When they identified a vampire, one of those responsible for the plague according to popular myth at the time, they introduced the stone as a protective element, preventing it from feeding and also from infecting other people,” Moraes explained to the site ancient-origins.
The mass grave site the body had been found in had been connected to a 14th-century sanatorium used to care for plague victims.
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