1,800-year-old nails discovered in 3 burials in Roman necropolis, possibly to ‘protect’ both the living and the dead

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1,800-year-old nails discovered in 3 burials in Roman necropolis, possibly to ‘protect’ both the living and the dead

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A close-up of a half-unearthed skeleton with a metal nail placed to the left of its ribcage — A close-up of the skeleton shows a nail placed above the chest (just to the left of the spine). (Image credit: Special Superintendence of Rome)

Small iron nails placed on the chests of three skeletons preserve an unusual detail on Ancient Roman burial practices: 1,800 years ago, someone was trying to protect the living from the dead.

Menghinello and his colleagues worked in the vast Ostiense Necropolis in the heart of Rome when they discovered three graves with nails deliberately placed on their chests, according to a March 4 report. translated statement of the Special Superintendence of Rome.

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The Ostiense necropolis was initially excavated in 1919but new archaeological work prior to the construction of housing has uncovered another part of the Via Ostiense cemetery, near the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls. The newly discovered site helps clarify how burial customs changed over the centuries as the Ostiense necropolis grew, Menghinello said.

“In ancient times, the sides of the road were occupied by a vast Roman necropolis” with several different types of tombs, Menghinello says, dating between the 2nd century BC and the 4th century AD. But the precise boundaries of the necropolis are not yet fully known, she explained. The skeletons buried with nails were found in simple tombs, probably dating from the 3rd and 4th centuries AD.

But the purpose of the nail remains a mystery.

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A close-up of one of three skeletons found with a nail in the Via Ostiense excavation site in Rome.

“Its function has been interpreted in different ways,” Menghinello said, noting that the nail may have been used to symbolically “keep” the dead from returning to haunt the living. If the body was not repaired, it was believed that the dead person could become a “returning“, or a resurrected corpse common in folklore.

But this practice may also have been intended to protect the deceased. When used in an apotropaic practice – intended to prevent evil – the nail became a sort of talisman to protect the deceased individual from the perils of the afterlife or to protect the tomb from disturbance, Menghinello said.

The nail ritual “would therefore have served to preserve the body from possible offenders at its final resting place, to protect the deceased from malevolent forces and, at the same time, to protect the surviving relatives from the possible return of the dead among the living,” Menghinello said.