The City of the Dead: Colma, California
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- Äas pĆidĂĄn 21. 08. 2024
- In this small city near San Francisco, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. There's some gruesome history here - and a few questions for the future.
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According to Wikipedia, the Colma's city motto is "It's great to be alive in Colma."
They want to celebrate the minorities
The City Hall in Colma has this motto on grave marker style plaque on their entrance. I had a great laugh when I sawit.
They should add a second part "its great to be dead in colma"
@@rzu1474 That's the joke.
@Topher TheTenth That was a long joke, and it wait exactly funny. Don't know what you really meant, but it sounded more like you were trying to make racism sound unimportant.
This feels like a really old-school video to me: I found an out-of-the-way place to film, held my camera, and just hit record. It's been a while!
Tom Scott sup
Why is this comment posted 1 week ago but the video is 1 minute old?
TheNinjas i know
The video was published 1 minute ago, uploaded earlier.
He makes a few videos at the same time but doesn't release them all at the same time
Disrespect for the dead becomes archeology when there are no relatives of the dead left to be disrespected. Because, after all, the dead cannot feel insulted.
Go back far enough up your family tree and then down another branch and we're all relatives of everyone who has ever lived or died.
Well, "relatives" could be a tricky criterion. How many generations later? How widely branched?
I'd suggest "when no-one remembers them" - as individuals rather than a statistic. To an extent, your level of renown determines how reverentially your remains will be treated.
Cristi Neagu I would argue that it is once the ceremony is out of living memory, i.e. All attendants are dead themselves
Exactly what I said!
Well, i meant all you guys said, but i wanted to package it neatly. Like i said, when no relatives are left to be disrespected. That implies someone remembers that person and they care in one way or another about them, so they would feel offended. But if they can't remember, or don't care, it's not impacting anyone, is it?
You missed an excellent opportunity to mention Colma's official motto: "It's great to be alive in Colma"
A bunch of comedians must run the city council :D
yes, as a local from the surrounding area they missed a joke when the bart (the tube of sf) was built, the station is just called colma. shouldve named it gravecity.
Aren't all governments run by comedians?
Could have been "we want you, dead or alive"
People in the comments shouldn't joke about such grave circumstances.
That's deep.
armvex About 6 feet deep, actually.
Agreed
damn you two are good at jokes
Fortunately this pun thread was buried before it could rise to the top.
2:07 Congratulations, you're not original
savage
HireDeLune
Ironically, neither was his invective.
This is edited.. đ€
@@Daro-Wolfemaybe typo
I loved that line too and I'm your 900th thumbs up!
My experience here in Germany is that you don't expect a permanent burial. It's not like the bury or burn question in Australia - here, even if you're burnt, your ashes are then buried. What's more, your family will plant things on your grave and come out regularly to tend the plants and have a chat. So you pay for your plot (or your family does, if you were disorganised) and your ashes rest there for 10 or 20 years. Your next of kin will be informed about a year in advance that the plot fee is due by a particular date and if it's not paid, your plot will be reused. It's clear when parts of the cemetery get to that age because the graves there sprout little notice stakes with the renewal date and contact details. If your loved ones don't renew, they can arrange to take the headstone home and pop it in the garden or wherever, so that even though the plot was reused, they have a memorial to you still.
As the great Danny Devito once said "When I'm dead just throw me in the trash"
Modern Diogenes.
@Herbie Langtry Yep, I changed it now.
Fitting profile pic.
Easy for him to say, he's short!
I think moving the dead becomes archeology once no one alive remembers you from personal experience
Kishore Shenoy exactly what i was going to say
joebiekong so you're not talking about being respectful to the dead, but rather the living. makes sense, because the dead are, well, dead.
yeah I posted something similar before I saw your comment
I would say it's immediately
but then that will never happen anymore as there is video now,
funerals are such a waste, body pumped full of formaldehyde, $10k casket. Everyone should get natural burials, biodegradable caskets, and often free depending on where you live
Embalming is a very American thing; if I recall correctly, Britain doesn't do that. Closed caskets are normal here.
In Slovenia we don't embalm people either, they are usually put on cold until the funeral (except if they are cremated, then they are put on hot ;) ) and then into a wooden casket of which i thankfully don't know the price yet and finally burried, usually in a family grave.
Same in Italy. You buy the funeral lot for 40-60 years, usually, then it will be reused.
Yeah-I find them really strange.
Truth. I'd much rather my body give life to other creatures.
To answer the question, I would guess it becomes archeology when there is nobody left to honor the memory of those dead. I chose those words carefully, as archeologists surely remember the dead, but don't remember the significance of the life associated with that bad, they can only make guesses. We all like to attach some kind of intangible value to people, alive or dead, so when that value has diminished, then it would no longer be remembrance, it would be academia.
JonFawkes This is my original thought but there's a whole for people who die alone, orphans, etc. If they have no one to remember them does it switch to time? and how long? I don't know
Kyah makes a good point with people who lack any family/friends yet also died very recently, but I do also want to bring up stuff like the graves of amazing leaders. Ramesses II or Alexander the Great are still widely loved today for the absolutely amazing things they accomplished. Maybe not as much as in their own time, but no one today(who knows their stuff) would call Ramesses II as anything other than one of the greatest leaders of ancient Egypt, or Alexander as anything other than one of the greatest military leaders of the ancient world. Both are still loved, and their actions and memories are honored, though in a different way. We still consider them to be part of archaeology.
I don't attach intangible value to corpses, they are just bones. Don't waste space burying them, just donate the body to science/organ transplant and then throw it in a lake or something
"nobody left to honor the memory" nobody left who actually remembers them, or nobody who cares at all? the latter would mean people are forced to pretend a lot of things are sacred
Jokes about zombies aside, I wonder if there are actually people that move there to try their hand at "ghost hunting"
Hamish Woodland no, we donât. Itâs just cleaner here
So you live there?
"When does moving a body stop being disrespect for the dead and start being archaeology"
Well, it depends how rich you were.
Not really: both kings and peasants of old are interesting for archaelogists, sometimes peasants even more so - lately more and more people are more interested in what the day-to-day life was like. Me myself even joined a Living History group where guys and gals are doing everything old-school way for a couple of days, or, as an experiment, performed by one guy, a year.
@@TheWinjin they mean that rich people get to stay in their grave uninterrupted for longer than regular people. People forget about regular people faster than they forget about the rich and famous.
It also depends whether you're British or not.
I've done a great deal of research on the subject in my country (France). I'm an architect / urban planner and transforming old cimetry in park has always been an appeling though to me.
The laws are design so that the town can take a spot only when no one alive care anymore for the dead there, or at least have not been carring for more than 30 years.
In reality, it really depends... i've seen small town take parts of there cimetry with the aprouval of everyone but generaly, any big town trying to move some dead bodies, old or not, will get a shitstorm comming thereway ! We avoid that with "partialy" taking parts only of the places over very long periods.
Here is a quick summary of the laws : since my country is "laĂŻc" (oversimplifing : less church power, more government power) all the cimetry are run by the townhalls (with some exeptions... of course, this is France, what did you expect ?)
And the rules are preatty clear. For free, you get a 5years spot. Then you can pay (if, and only if, the town allows you to) for eather 15, 30, 50 or an unlimited time spot. They can all be extended ONLY if the townhall agrees AND by a relative of the dead.
For the lifetimes ones, they can be take back by the town after 30 years if noone came there (relative or not), and after a two year notice has been given (5 for "dead for the country").
But a townhall can move cimetry without asking anything to anyone.
For the lazy reader... 30 years in France :)
I bet there are people who are DYING to live in Colma CA!
Heh.
Kevin P I saw what you did there, take your like good Sr.
Kevin P well done my friend
Not really, it's pretty much a GHOST town!
There's no such thing as a good pun. The good ones are the bad ones.
Summed up the CZcams comment section as a whole: "Congratulations, you're not original."
When there's no one left that cares about the dead? If there's no family or friends of that person, there's no one to disrespect, or at the very least, no one to care.
Tom a cynical answer to your question: when no one cares that the body is moved
But then this was probably quite disrespectful.
I see your answer as more honest than cynical, which I guess sounds cynical
I'd say it starts being archeology when more can be learned from digging someone up than looking at surviving records
probably best answer here...
In Poland you get a grave for 20 years, your family can extend that but it costs.
here in Belgium it is 10 years and you can buy extensions, the only really permanent grave sites that I know of are those of Jewish cemeteries.
In Switzerland it is similar, nothing like permanent graves here.
It is similar in Germany: 20 to 30 years is the legally required "resting duration", depending on the Ground the body was layed in and you can buy a few ten year extensions at ever growing rates. Only in a "Friedenswald" (directly translated Forrest of Peace) where only one Body is buried under each tree you can get up to 99 years maximum, but that is really an exception.
Same in .... ok, Thorbjoern already said it.
What happens after 20 years? Are the bodies exhumed and destroyed?
If you go to some thousand year old cemeteries in Arabia and elsewhere in the MiddleEast, you might see that bodies have been buried in the same graves. Not mass graves, but rather, a sequence of bodies in a stack. When somebody dies, they may be placed in a grave underneath another body, with the grave marked for everyone in there. When it's not really feasible to keep burying people, new dirt might be added on top.
I'm dying to go there. It's the dead centre of NorCal. I'm here all week.
I'm planning to go there next Thanksgiving. I hear there's lots of grave-y.
PsychicRadroach Of corpse there is. See, what I did was, I took the word corpse...
Jim Gardner 2:08
I totally see some dark, edgy teens in leather coats chilling there and reading Edgar Allen Poe...
I would guess when the living inhabitants no longer understand the dead persons culture/language
seems like the best answer
Thought experiment: The US decides that it needs the island of Iceland, they want to use it as a restricted military base or something, and figures that the most practical way for them to do so is to kill all inhabitants Iceland. They proceed to drop nerve gas from the sky and build their military base. Accordingly, there are no living inhabitants of Iceland around who understand the Icelandic language and culture. Would it then be okay for the US military to immediately go forward and demolish all Icelandic graves? Would that "just" be archaeology?
I believe we were operating under the assumption that the society died off naturally, not through an act of war.
Also, there are plenty of resources online that go into detail regarding Icelandic culture. Killing of inhabitants today most likely doesn't destroy our understanding of anyone's culture.
Gunnar Grautnes Well, no. Other people understand Icelandic that don't live in Iceland, and, while we might not be a part of it, we still know of their culture. We still understand it.
The whole idea of burials an "permanent" resting places have always been ludicrous.
The more remote burial plots can be a little more permanent...
+Cooro Fox There are many, underfunded groups dedicated to search the entire planet and proof you wrong.
Greg the Mad I did say little more, not saying they are always going to be properly permanent...
Not if you think Jesus is returning in a few hundred years max.
Cooro Fox Yes, but I'd argue that there simply is nothing between permanent or not permanent. "a little more permanent" is like saying "half an infinity".
... oh wow, it didn't even occur to me to consider graves permanent? I am from that area of Europe you mentioned, apparently - graves being reused after 40 years or so is just... normal! Lots of people end up keeping the gravestones of their ancestors in their gardens, if they have them. Your question at the end though: really interesting, and something I'm gonna be ruminating over for a while, I think.
In my view, it's not about when you do it, it's about why. Moving a body because you want to learn more about that person's culture and the environment in which they lived is archaeology, no matter how old the body is. Moving a body for any other reason is disrespect for the dead, again not matter how old the body is.
Najarala But what if you were just digging to build foundations and found a body? Is that disrespectful?
I know someone who found a body while building a new kitchen. He refused to allow it to be removed and built the foundations around the body. The body was 17th century.
By the way you worded that it makes it sound like somebody could be unburdened only after a day in the ground and still be considered "learning about their culture and environment;" I guess it makes slightly more sense taking it to the other extreme.
Drake Winters If you want to learn about someone who was buried in the ground a day ago go Google them.
***** Just a joke mate x3
I think archeology starts when you can no longer put a name to a skeleton.
A really good point! I agree.
So where does that leave Howard Carter? Tutankhamun had his name in graffiti all over his tomb.
Tutankhamun was the banksy of his time
DanieleGiorgino I really like your answer, but what about this scenario: An African dictator decides to murder some ethnic group in his country. The members of this ethnic group are poor, so there is no record of their medical history, dentistry, or DNA. After the massacre, the victims are put into a mass grave. A month later, the dictator is overthrown. The new government wants to wipe out the massacre from public memory and orders for the mass grave to be removed and the corpses destroyed. Would that be "just" archaeology? (I also really like the Tutankhamen example above.)
I think those two are some different question: it's not disrespectfull till a certain time and than starts beeing archeology. It starts beein not (less) disrespectfull
GREAT PLACE TO FILM A HORROR MOVIE, NOT SUCH A GREAT PLACE TO BE WHEN THE ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE HITS!
Thanks for the congratulations.
I guess when nobody can tell who the person is right away, either by markers or relatives.
so the people in the morge shouldnt be buried...
To answer your question: Its not when its who.
"how"
In my town in Germany, a grave is reserved for 50 years at most, and by then everything has decayed anyways. My grandfather got buried in the exact same spot as his grandfather.
I don't know about anyone else, but I kind of want to find a plot of land somewhere that I can build a scale model of the great pyramids on. Nothing too huge, just 4:1, maybe 6:1 if time and money allows...
Well at 6:1 you will have a building higher than Burj Khalifa (assuming you used the Great Pyramid of Giza as a reference). I guess everyone can have there dreams...
Maybe 100:1 is probably what you're after.
Brainstorm4300
Well 6:1 is six times Larger, 1:6 is six times smaller...
Brayden Forbes 100:1 would just be showing off... And I expect causing serious environmental impact... As in, beginning to deform a tectonic plate kind of impact.
RealLuckless What's the point of rebuilding it if you don't want to make it bigger. Bigger is better. That, and I have a very poor understanding of ratios.
"The City of the Dead" - Is it, perhaps, at the end of another lost highway? Are there signs misleading to nowhere?
That closing question was incredibly powerful. Great job Tom!
There's a totally dilapidated graveyard in Auckland, New Zealand, right in the middle of the city. It's pretty great for walks, I used to come there a lot. Weird how it can be so central yet so run down, but maybe the land will be bought up and used for something else soon enough.
Here in Europe, most countries have so-called âDecomposing Periodâ, usually 10 to 25 years (depending mainly on composition of the soil but also on laws and customs). You are welcome to pay for the grave plot for as long as you want but if you stop after this time (which you often have to pre-pay wholly when burying someone there) and some new body is to be buried there or the graveyard is closed altogether, any remains are usually moved to a mass grave or an ossuary, the latter of which can be called archaeology.
-It starts being archaeology when it's old af-
When there are no living direct relatives?
Anyone with a drop of European blood is directly descended from Charlemagne. Does that mean his body will never be archeology?
Finn Else-McCormick
Well not exactly 100% but close enough.
So, only father-son descendants? In other words if a man with no sons dies, don't bother burying him if his daughters are all married. Patriarchy much?
Oh yeah, I forgot that surnames change that often. Crap.
Finn Else-McCormick
I would argue it becomes archeology when you are unable to trace the dead person to a living descendant, either because their family line dies off, or it was long enough ago that such records were lost to time.
Christopher McKee True, true
The interesting thing is that, somewhere between being hallowed remains and archeological finds, the dead become so much debris.
Brilliant final question there Tom. I remember a few years ago when we buried my father the cemetery didn't have any way to deal with this problem in their contracts. we challenged them on the question of how long we'd have to pay the rental and they couldn't answer, a parent nobody had thought further than "forever"
I would say that moving bodies become archeology once the society that person was a part of has disappeared.
I remember a story from someone who came into possession of a thousand year old English church and rectory, who observed that it appeared the buildings had settled into the terrain. Then he found out that in fact the area around the church had been the graveyards, rotating around the site over the years. The elevated level of soil was in fact a thousand years of villagers, staying in the community, so to say.
Honestly I either want to be cremated and have my ashes promptly spread somewhere special (not kept in a jar, how creepy is that) or be buried with some sort of seed or sapling of a cherry blossom tree and have it absorb my body's nutrients. How much cooler would it be to become a beautiful tree than to rest eternally as a rotting corpse beneath a rock.
This is likely less true as you ask older and older segments of the population, but none of my friends seem to have any real interest in being buried in the ground in a traditional fashion. It just seems outdated.
archaeology starts when the body can give us information about the times it was buried in
but being dug up isn't always disrespectful
personally id be happy to be dug up if my remains can help
necrophile here... i'll take note of that
"When does moving a body stop being disrespectful"
The second the body is pronounced dead.
well, I would argue with that as even if you discard the religious arguments there are still the families to consider and their attachment to the person that used to be. I would argue that it's more when no one is alive that remembers that person as being living. Then there can be the distance and objectivity that the science requires but until then you are just messing with what is left of someone who is still loved.
When the relatives say, "Who's that, again?
***** Yeah, but because you're disrespecting me, not because you're disrespecting my mother.
Greg the Mad How am I disrespecting you man. I'm just mixing organic waste with organic waste.
"Time of death 11:55 AM. We did all we could... alright, let's move him."
"DON'T BE SO DISRESPECTFUL!"
To answer your question: When you didn't know it was going to be there. When the best word to use is discovered.
we discovered your corpse floating on the river.... is it ok now?
"So when does it stop being grave robbing and start being archaeology?"
"...As an archaeologist I find this question VERY DISCOMFORTING."
"Answer the question, *grave robber."*
In the Netherlands a grave has to be left alone for at least ten years. After that any remains can be buried deeper underground so that other family members can be buried in the same grave. Or any remains can be dug up and either be cremated and returned to the family, or be interred in the graveyards bone cellars/catacombs. You can lengthen the lease of a gravesite as well, which is common if it is to be used as a family grave.
Embalming isn't common here (just plain illegal unless there are very specific circumstances), so ten years is usually enough to break the body down quite a bit.
Disrespecting the dead turns into archaeology when people forget who was buried there
so its the tombstone of... i dont know, charlemagne... its still disrespectfull to open?
When there's no space left to bury the dead... The dead will walk the earth.
I swear you are among my Top 3 CZcams channel. Your videos are so interesting but damn, those questions at the end always strike me.
Check out how it's done in New Orleans - not the funeral parades, but the way water pressure pushes bodies to erupt from the earth necessitating above-ground interment, the crypts in the cemeteries, the slots in the walls around the cemetery, the "one year and a day" rule for reuse - it's all fascinating.
Cremation is best. No chemicals or embalming. No expensive casket. The plot can be the most expensive part. A small cubby is used for cremation while still providing a marker for family and friends to visit. To me, a casket funeral is just wasteful and pointless. Want an open wake? You can do that. They will cremate your body after the wake. It's cheaper, and more efficient while still achieving everything a traditional burial does. Only exception is for religious reasons.
Love Toms way of deal with the comments
In my mother's village, in Portugal, the plots are frequently reused. There's routine exhumations five years after the burial, and if the soft tissues have decomposed, then whenever the person holding the plot's deed, or any of their loved ones, dies, they're buried in the same plot. My grandmother is in the same grave as my grandfather, and they're in the same grave as my grandfather's parents. The bones of the previous occupants are held in a box kept inside the grave as well.
And this is in a small village, in the middle of nowhere, with plenty of land around the cemetery to expand.
I do believe there's a bit of ingrained superstition that sharing the grave with your loved one means you'll spend your lifetime with them. People with illnesses often try to hold out until their loved one's grave is declared reusable so they can be buried together.
Thereâs a cemetery near UGA that claims to be âno longer in useâ, which doesnât make sense if the bodies still reside there. đ
exactly after 450 years 7 months 25 days 16 hours 47 minutes and 32 seconds after the time of death.
I mean everyone know that scott ask harder questions next time
I wouldn't want to be buried, no ones gonna know who you are after 1-3 generations of your death.
How would you prefer to be⊠handled after death.
I want to my corpse to be launched into the deep space.
Or just cremated.
could be up to 4 or 5 generations.
you could issue that your body would be given to a necrophilic person. That would probably at least make one person happy after you death.
That might not be the case anymore pretty soon. If you can record most of your life highlights and put them into a single 2-4 hour package, which could then be watched by future generations, if you're interesting enough. Hell, some people have already begun documenting (looking at you, social media).
Personally, I believe that it becomes archeology when the traditions and cultures of that person's era are phased out or are replaced.
You raise a good question at the end of the video. When I recently visited the Louvre, I considered the justness of placing mummies on display in museums. Would I want my body on display hundreds or thousands of years later for curious people to see? Definitely not. No mummy ever signed a consent form, but what this video plainly illustrates is that the rights of the dead die with them.
âȘ ...at the end of another lost highway, signs misleading to nowhere â«
I prefer when the dead bodies become oil. Then it becomes an industry.
In millions and millions of years? It will all be renewable by then, or, alternatively, the earth will have become Venus.
In Norway it is 20 years (or 25), if the family don't pay to keep the grave. If they don't pay for the spot the grave is dug up and any remains, if any, are removed and I suppose burnt or disposed of in hazard marked bags or something like that.
I have family resting in Colma. A little tidbit about what Tom Scott said about the reburials of graves: one cemetery - specifically Greenlawn, holds a bulk of reinterred bodies from San Francisco in mass unmarked graves. It's not far different from forgotten bodies being exhumed during construction, however: this mass grave has been turned into a flower farm. It's been forgotten, off-limits to visitors and only a broken memorial stands in the middle of it.
It leads me to wonder how we can trust Colma to preserve the dead any better than people trusted San Francisco cemeteries to do so.
Their town motto is "It's great to be alive in Colma."
Asking the deep, philosophical questions today Tom. I guess I would say it's archeology when there is no one left that knew them or of them. The Ancient Egyptians called this "the second death" when there was no one left to remember their name, about 75 years after the physical death. However, this timeline falls apart in the age of the Internet as this comment will exist for as long as there is someone to maintain the CZcams server apon which it resides
That sounds like a pretty good start to me. Although to be real archaeology, I think digging up the body would have to be useful to understanding the past better. Has to be useful to the science- if it isn't, it'd be a waste of time and money and disrespectful even if no one on earth could possibly know their name.
To go on to the Egyptian "second death" concept- even if we didn't have the Internet, people are living much longer today than in the past. So it'd be longer than 75 years now. But here's another interesting idea- someday, when we're dead but the Internet still has our social media posts here, people will still have our day-to-day comments. Imagine if they'd had Twitter at JFK's assassination or MLK's 'I have a dream' speech, man. Seeing peoples' comments on those events as they were happening would be amazing, wouldn't it?
Pickletine el Taimados Of course life expectancy has increased since just the birth of the industrial revolution, let alone since BCE.
Iâm an avid viewer of âTime Teamâ, a British TV-show about archeology, that ran for two decades. They asked themselves the same question a number of times. Sometimes they were digging up WW2 stuff when they would run into bodies. Those would be just 60, 70 years dead and buried. I suppose it depends on the historical context.
On the other hand, I have also visited a village that was being demolished to make room for the open air mine near Köln (Cologne) in Germany. The graveyard had just been cleared; the bodies exhumed to be moved elsewhere, together with the still living inhabitants of the village. But I picked up several bones from the surface, which proved to me that the commercial aspect of the whole operation was more important than having respect for the dead and the historical context.
I've decided to be cremated, though I haven't officially specified this anywhere. My father was buried, and I believe I have a plot set aside nearby for me, as it's a cemetery culturally and historically associated with my family, but I have no personal attachment to that location or the practice of retaining a corporeal body. I find it strange to visit a grave of someone I knew, the good memories I have of them are not connected with that place or the situation that put them there. I'd rather be remembered at places where I was happy and loved, rather than at the place they were weepy and sad.
Archaeology was my major in college, and honestly the question of when archaeology begins/is okay is an extremely contentious one. There is no uncontroversial definition and everyone will have their own opinions. My opinion is that once enough generations have passed that someone leaves living memory, and their name is no longer important to their descendants individually, then the entire community that they were a part of becomes their effective next-of-kin, and whether or not it's okay to study them is a decision that has to be made at that level. That's why it's wrong to say that white archaeologists have the right to study native american remains because they're older than 200 years, when the surviving nations don't want that to happen. Different communities will decide differently based on what is right for them. Egypt might decide the pyramids are fair game to learn from (collectively, it's not going to be unanimous of course), while another culture might decide that THEIR ancient monuments should be left alone. And outsiders must respect that, because that history is theirs to look after.
If you ever went to Czech republic, will you make a video about the Old Jewish Cemetery? It's one of the oldest jewish burial grounds in the whole world, the oldest grave dating as far as 1439. Also, because of space problems, the graves are stacked on each other, sometimes as much as 10 layers of them. (Sorry for any grammar mistakes.)
This is why I prefer the German system for burial plots: You don't "buy" the plots, you lease them (usually for at least 1-3 decades at a time). You also pay for the burial as a separate service, rather than something included with the plot. This means that you need to either make provisions so that your estate will cover the costs or, more commonly, your children will be paying. (If nobody's around to pay then the municipality will probably be paying for a no-frills minimum-cost burial)
This system means that there's a very clear point at which point your not-so-final resting place will be made available to others: When nobody cares enough to pay the plot lease anymore. This system makes so much sense I was actually surprised to learn that most countries use the "purchased plot" system.
What makes it more ominous is that sunny days like the one in this video are rare, its almost always foggy
That last question though. Damn
Archeology, when you lost control over the grave. No one visits or maintain it.
This is actually a pretty decent answer
You have assumed a fitting name in order to comment on moving dead bodies, mr Glyndwr Michael! :-D
Glyndwr Michael I have a keen interest in military history, especially WWII onwards, because of that I have known the fascinating story of "major Martin" for years. I am sure you have seen Tom's recent video on Operation Mincemeat as well? I thought that was where you got the inspiration for the name.
Benny Löfgren It was a awesome video, but I've known about Mr. Michaels for years. Fascinating story. :)
in italy, usually after 99 years the grave is emptied and the remains put in a ossary with all others, meanwhile the now empty grave is given to someone else
it is the case in most of the Europe, from what I can tell.
here is my though :
why use a physical graveyard ?
why not perhaps a electronic one ? where not only the memories of your past could be stored forever, but a place where family trees could be made and expanded as time goes, where everyone could have a description wich lasts forever, and is never in the need of repair or replacement ?
I'd say it's archaeology by the time that there is no one alive that remember who they were ie. actually met the person who is dead.
o/` Gravestones cheer the living dear o/` They're no use to the dead o/` (Buy For Me The Rain, by Nitty Gritty Dirt Band).
That's a great way to look at it
1500 people live here and it is a ghost town.
When does moving a body stop being disrespect and start being archaeology?
I would draw the line at everyone who would have known that person when they were alive also being dead. To people who remember you in life, your body isn't a body. It's you. Once those people are gone there is nobody to bereave when you exhume or move a body, you may annoy some distant family members, but that's all they would be. Distant, without a direct line to your life and times.
So basically, once a dead person can't play six degrees of separation without having to go through another dead person, you're good to go.
I remember thinking a similar thing about seeing a mummified body in the British Museum. People weren't horrified by the body, myself included. I wondered what age of dead body would start / stop horrifying people.
My great aunt lived and died in San Francisco when I was somewhat young. I cannot remember where exactly she was buried, but I certainly do remember going to her funeral and this cemetery looks remarkably similar to my memory. Either all cemeteries look the same, or she was in fact buried in Colma.
Wow! It's like a horror mo-
Oh :(
What a neat and clean way to end the video. Congrats Tom, good one.
Loved seeing you on royal Institute's latest video. Always nice to see favorite channels crossing over.
I think part of the problem is that, not only do we insist on burying people, we insist on embalming and preserving their bodies when we do so. If soil conditions are right a body could rejoin the carbon cycle in about 12-18 months, bones and all.
If we stopped treating bodies so they couldn't rot, and started treating cemetery soil so that they could, we would not have a problem with overcrowding. Once it came time to reuse a plot, it would already be vacant.
Same here in the Netherlands. I've never even heard about embalming until I saw the episode "Adam Ruins Everything - How Funerals Completely Rip Us Off". Here we have quite often an open casket and cooling the body works perfectly fine in keeping the body presentable.
20quid the ground at American cemeteries must be full of chemicals from all the embalming.
I'm pretty sure the turnover rate for a grave here in Denmark is 20 years. Unless it's a family grave.
That's 9 degrees of spin in your grave per year.
Hamachingo Thank you.
Hamachingo but the real question is how we can harness that spin and use it to generate electricity.
Here in the Netherlands it's 30 years by default, I believe, although you can pay to extend it to 50 years, and a very select number of cemeteries still offer essentially eternal graves. I actually happen to live very near to the nationally designated area where they scatter the powdered up remains that are still left after graves expire; it's a very nice bit of forest, and if it weren't for the signs, you simply wouldn't notice you're walking among literally millions of dead people. Well, powdered dead people anyway...
Dead people make great fertiliser.
The answer is 42. 42 years is how long it takes for it to be respectful.
Here in Belgium, you get a notice after 20 years that the grave will be removed if you haven't bought that plot of land (30 years if it's a baby or young child).
If you have bought that piece of land, you will get the notice after 50-60 years, if you want to pay for longer or that they will remove it, especially if it's withering away and not been taken care of (or forgotten).
(Please note these aren't exact figures and they may differ from town to town)
In response to your question: Immediately.
Also: That has to be the WORST place to live during a zombie apocalypse.
that_pac12
"If you've already commented that, congratulations, you're not original"
đ
Wanna know what's really original? Being condescending towards youtube comments. That I've never seen before.
Tom, you've done it again - made me actually think: 'I did not know that.' You have also saved me the embarrassment of asking a Colma cab driver to take me to the dead centre of town. To answer your question, I would say that disrespect becomes archaeology when enough time has passed that the bodies that are unearthed are of people long forgotten, even if marked by a stone. Whatever happens, the dead remain dead, and are not going to be bothered whether dug up or left under the soil. I have no fear of death - in fact, I find that there is one certainty in life, oddly comforting. I was with both my parents when they died, and found the experience quite humbling. Very sad, extremely disturbing, as you might expect, but not frightening.
A dead body is useless unless you're harvesting organs. More respect should be given to the person while they were alive.
It becomes archeology when the city you lived in no longer exists in the memories of living people.
Napoli has been consistently inhabited for the past 4500 years. Is any archeological dig in that area therefore disrespectful to the dead?
Places in Europe have started reusing cemetery plots? Wasn't that the custom hundreds of years ago, along with ossuaries?
Europe is an old place - hundreds of years ago *is* just "started". :-)
The Major Well, the Clovis culture in America was around 13,500 years ago, but so what?
Or a more philosophical sounding question:
When does moving a body stop being disrespect for the dead, and start being respect for the living?
Today I learned I've been to every grave yard in San Francisco. I never thought about the fact that we have no normal current grave yards.
According to a friend of mine, it should take 3 centuries to become archaeology. Enough time for all the living relatives to have died.
Takes far fewer than 3 centuries for the living relatives to die, and for them to be mostly forgotten. I can't even say anything substantial about relatives beyond my grandparents, let alone more than a century ago.
I meant the entire family. Genealogy is an increasingly popular thing. It leaves enough time for the whole of the lineage to Dir from not reproducing.
"For good reasons [half ... pause] and religion and tradition".
I see what you did there...
100 years in the UK usually. The plots are usually leases for 99 years. After that you can be turfed out. Bath has a bunch of mass graves from cemeteries that have been reclaimed.
If you buy the land after the last of the leases has expired, you can keep the bodies and gravestones.