Ossuary

After a century of death denial, and hiding all traces of our mortality from our consciousness, finally we are reverting to the norm of realising we need to see death to confront our own lives. These photos are of some of the 2500 skulls at one of the two remaining ossuaries in England. Most ossuaries were buried or lost as graveyards stopped being a place to consume the flesh off bones (which were then stored in the church), but graves became a place of permanent undisturbed rest - not jsut for the dead but for the living to not have to see human remains. Each skull shows its individual features - but mostly not from life, but the effects of damage and crumbling after 700 years of storage and handling. In the past, some skulls would have been known, and handled by their relatives in an act of remembrance. One skull in the set shows these signs of handling, now retaining a polish to the bone.