Romeo and Juliet found in an eternal embrace?
 by
Aditha Dissanayake
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The young lovers remains were buried in the romantic city where
Romeo and Juliet lived.
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While the world celebrated Valentine's day last Wednesday with roses,
candles and declarations of true love, archaeologists pondered on two
skeletons locked in a tender embrace near Verona, Italy. They wondered
if this could be humanity's oldest story of doomed love.
According to sources from the Associated Press, the two skeletons
unearthed by archaeologists, locked in a tender embrace, and found
buried outside Mantua date back to the Neolithic period. The site is
just 25 miles south of Verona, the romantic city where Shakespeare set
the star-crossed tale of "Romeo and Juliet."
Buried between 5,000 and 6,000 years ago, the prehistoric pair are
believed to have been a man and a woman and are thought to have died
young, as their teeth were found intact, says Elena Menotti, the
archaeologist who led the excavations.
"As far as we know, it's unique," says Menotti. "Double burials from
the Neolithic are unheard of, and these are even hugging."
The burial site was located during construction work for a factory
building in the outskirts of Mantua. Alongside the couple,
archaeologists had also found flint tools, including arrowheads and a
knife. Experts will now study the artifacts and the skeletons to
determine the burial site's age and how old the two were when they died.
But according to anthropologist at Rome's National Prehistoric and
Ethnographic Museum, Luca Bondioli, there is nothing new in the
skeletons as archaeologists have already found prehistoric burials in
which the dead hold hands, before this.
The find has "more of an emotional than a scientific value", says
Bondioli. But agrees that it does highlight how the relationships have
not changed much from the period in which humanity first settled in
villages, learning to farm the land and tame animals.
The two bodies, which cuddle closely while facing each other on their
sides, were probably buried at the same time, an indication of a
possible sudden and tragic death. "It's rare for two young people to die
at the same time, and that makes us want to know why and who they were,
but it will be very difficult to find out." says Bondioli.
He says DNA testing could determine whether the two were related,
"but that still leaves other hypotheses; the Romeo and Juliet
possibility is just one of many." |
