What is the most useful thing for historians to find in graves?

by Spoopy_Fox
Thaladan

Well... historians primarily study textual sources, differentiating them from archaeologists who focus on material evidence.

So to answer your question, the most useful thing that a historian could find in a grave would be an otherwise lost textual source, preserved in excellent condition. That's assuming that we're defining 'useful' as something like 'most informative'.

Unfortunately, such a find is exceedingly rare, at least for ancient history (my area). I'm not aware of any texts that were recovered from graves, except possibly one or two scrolls from the tomb of Tutankhamen and a few other pharaohs. Manuscripts are very fragile, and are only preserved in exceptional circumstances, like in the arid sands of Egypt or in the ash of Pompeii (regarding the latter, I think that archaeologists are still trying to work out how to read the solidified scrolls).

Not a comprehensive answer, but I hope it helps. Not sure if I'm meant to provide sources, but I studied ancient history up to graduate level and published my thesis in a peer-reviewed journal.

Typologyguy

As u/Thaladan pointed out. The excavation of graves is undertaken by archaeologists rather than historians. As for what is most useful for our understanding of history, that really depends on where we're talking about. If the grave dates to a time and is in a place where we have very little archaeological evidence (due to low population at a particular point in the past, a culture which did not typically treat the dead in a way which leaves remains, or perhaps environmental conditions which degrade or destroy bone), then simply having a grave with the bones in good condition can be an exciting find.

On the other hand, we might be talking about a grave from a time and place where archaeologists have already found plenty of graves in good condition, but this grave might contain an item or items that allow us some insight into dress that hasn't been found before: like a brooch or brooches positioned in specific parts of the body, a belt buckle, or hair ornaments and rings. When we find such things outside of graves it can be difficult to say exactly how people wore them. We can intuit likely ways of wearing personal ornaments, but unless we find them in place on a body or on a depiction of a person, we cannot say for certain whether people wore beads for example as bracelets on their wrists or as necklaces or strung in fringes on a garment.

So the answer is, as with so many things about the past, "it depends"

Lizarch57

As an archaeologist, I can tell you that undisturbed graves always are special in some way, at least for me. I am working mostly during or before building activities take place, so excavating graves usually prevents them from being destroyed during the building activities taking place after we are done.

But grave goods in general are important because they provide the context and the dating. That is the main reason why we are always so sad (or mad) if illegal digging activity provides special finds. Their context simply is lost. The layout of a grave, its size, its construction, the placing of the body or ashes, the construction of the coffin or urn (if there is any), materials used, the choice and the postioning of goods on or around the body - all these details together compose the insight we are looking for.

So it's not the material in itself, it is the context that matters, and every piece of information that can be gathered this way can be useful, even if it is not always understood at once. Because of this, everything is documented as thoroughly as possible through fotography, drawing and description to allow researchers access to all possible information later on.

For my area of work, textiles and other organics are always very special, because they so rarely survive til today. This usually does not mean that a whole garment survives, we are talking about tiny bits of fabric that are encomposed when the iron parts of brooches or belt fittings or other iron objects are becoming rusty. Mostly this means that more questions arise than are answered when these are examined.

But you cannot tell which piece of information is most useful. When excavationg a whole cemetery, the graves without grave goods (normally interpreted as poorer) are useful because they can tell how special the ones with grave goods might be, when contrasting the numbers of "poor" graves to "rich" graves they allow statistics on how society was organised, the bones allow to determine if the people were well fed or not, how healthy they were in general and how old they became. They layout might indicate how the cemetary developed and how many persons per generation lived in the area.

Of course, special grave goods are exiting. They can provide information about materials used, the craft process involved in the making, possible trading networks and the value that was assigned to certain materials in the past. If things seem to come from far away, the next question has to be if the item that ended as a grave good traveled through a trading network, or if the person traveled with this exotic item and this might also representing a migration process.

But even if a grave is a "basic" grave within a certain well known time period with already enough data to provide a good reconstruction of that time, it will also add some bits of information to the broader picture and be still useful.

I realize this is another very long version of "it depends" like from u/Typologyguy but I do hope nonetheless it helps understanding why.

_limun_

I'm an archaeologist, so I will give you the answer from my perspective, but you should also keep in mind that I'm talking from my, European perspective, and about archaeology that was developed under influence of German school of archaeology.

Simple answer would be that most useful thing to find is some object that you can date. For example, coin. Since coins are easy to date, because they looked differently in different time periods, and each ruler had different coins, you can get some kind of general understanding when this person was buried. But, you should also keep in mind that some coins, or different valuable objects, could be some kind of family heirlooms, so sometimes there is no correlation with the actual date of the object and time when the person was buried. Also, in Europe, or at least in my part of the Europe, in medieval ages, when influence of christianity was at its peek, a lot of people were buried without any objects. They believed that they don't need earthly possessions for the afterlife, so many graves from that time usually don't have objects that we can date. Today, we usually date this types of graves with c14 (radiocarbon dating; you take a sample of the bone to get the dates when person died). For prehistoric graves, you can use objects, especially pottery, that was decorated differently in different time periods, to get time period when this burial happened, but most archaeologist today also send samples of bones to c14. For roman and greek times, there is a lot more objects that can be used to date graves, since this period is well researched, and romans usually have a lot of stuff in their graves. What is important to understand, that grave in it's self is valuable for archaeologist, not just the objects that we can find there. You can look at what was used for burials, for example were the people cremated or did they buried the bodies in caskets (and caskets are fairly recent thing), or in what position was body buried (laying on the back, hocker position, or even how the hands were placed). In medieval times rich people were buried inside the churches, so also, the position where you find the grave is also important to understand social standing of the person that was buried. Anthropological analysis of the human remains can give you the age, gender or sometimes cause of deaths, so you can get some picture of how the people lived in certain times in the past, for example were there any sickness in that society, did they have enough food and stuff like that. And the last thing that is important is that usually the objects we find in the graves don't have to be connected with the way that people lived, because they usually represent religious aspects of life. They help us to understand how people viewed death, but they cannot give us the full understanding of every day life of people and societies that existed in the past, just one small part.