Belonging to the time of the Wari Empire and containing people of both genders, several were found wearing carved masks or adorned with ceramics placed on ‘false heads’.
The bodies of around 20 people were discovered in a large pit at the site of a former German prisoner-of-war camp Stalag II D in Stargard, around 40 kilometres from Szczecin.
Archaeologists who made the grim discovery during work at the garden’s Maria Curie-Skłodowska University say they currently unsure why the people were buried here but suggest they could have been the victim of a plague which swept across the country in the 15th century.
The grim discovery was made in an abandoned souls' graveyard in Pień near Bydgoszcz where last year the grave of a ‘vampire woman’ was also found.
The huge grave containing around 450 skeletons revealed that many of the bodies showed signs of anti-vampire practices common in Kashubia in the 19th century.
Hoping to find preserved fragments of old city walls, archaeologists in Słomniki have instead unearthed a near perfect skeleton lying in a foetal position.
The remains of the nine heads were uncovered by a team from the Polish Center of Mediterranean Archaeology at the University of Warsaw working at the Theban Necropolis in Upper Egypt.
Archaeologists exhuming the grave in the town of Barborów came across bullet-ridden helmets, broken bones, dog tags, coins, Swastika badges, shoes, a whistle and a chain with a lucky horseshoe.
The team of researchers from the Nicholas Copernicus University in Toruń found that the body in the village of Pień had a sickle placed over its neck, which they say would have been to prevent her from returning to mortality, and a padlock on the big toe of her left foot.
Having been first decapitated, the skulls in Gliwice had been placed between the victims’ legs leading some to speculate that they had belonged to people suspected of being vampires.
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