I'm interested in genealogy and have been trying to track down the graves of my ancestors in Europe. Were graves ever re-used? If so, was this common? I can't imagine how so many generations of people could all be buried in the same little church graveyard.
Oh, there are photographs you'd love. Well, maybe - you might hate them, because yes, yes, graves were re-used fairly routinely. And the remains...
Remains in many places were regularly moved out of the cemetery and into the adjacent catacombs, where they were piled in niches in the walls. Some, like the Catacombs of St. Gennaro in Naples, are tourist attractions today.
But in some places, like the Sedlec Ossuary in the Czech Republic, the exhumed bones are used to make some rather elaborate decorations - chandeliers made from dozens of femurs, infant Jesus seated on an array of skulls, skulls and scapulae making the outline of a crown....
Similar places can be found from Poland to Portugal and Paris.
They're really pretty amazing.
Some of the Royal Parks in London couldn't be built on, even if people were allowed to do so, because the ground is too unstable because of the massive quantity of human remains buried beneath them. When the Tube was being built, some lines had to be diverted around the parks because surveyors concluded that the "ground" was to unstable to be tunneled through because the "ground" was essentially a mass of human remains. If you consider the numbers of people who have died and been buried in major European cities over the centuries, it could be argued that, when the graveyards were closed to new burials, graves were being dug into, and bodies were being buried in, human remains.