So @at-least-three-bears has just been to visit for several days, and yesterday we went to Salisbury Museum. I need to be emotional about my most favourite exhibit there:
This is a group burial of 4 people, dated to around 5,200 years ago. There's an adult woman, and 3 children, only one of whom is related to her.
And I cannot explain fully why this exhibit moves me so much, but I'll try:
We know so very little about this woman. She wasn't local to this area originally, but at some point she came here, said "is anyone gonna parent those?" about two siblings, and clearly didn't wait for an answer. Was she already pregnant when she 'acquired' those two young children? Was the father dead, missing, absent, irrelevant? Whoever he was, he didn't get buried with them.
But those two children, unrelated to her by blood, were clearly important enough to her that they were all buried together. The whole family of four were all clearly important enough to their community that they were all buried in the centre of a site of importance, in a grave cut from chalk using stone and antler tools.
We don't know how they died, or why they all died together. We don't know who buried them, just that they buried them all together. We don't know what the site was originally used for, just that it housed their final resting place.
We don't know anything about this family, but we know they were here.
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If you're ever in Salisbury, UK, please check out the museum. It's absolutely fantastic, and it covers the history of the area from as far back as nearly 500,000 years ago.
Yeah, you heard me. There's evidence of human life here from almost half a million years ago.
It's a fascinating journey.
