Historical Re-enactors Show What Belongings They Would “Take” To The Afterlife (11 Pics)

It’s one thing to not be able to spend your entire life without your laptop, but all of eternity? That’s one heck of a personal statement. And in the past, people weren’t afraid to make them. Grave goods, in archaeology and anthropology, are the items buried along with the body, and researchers have learned quite a lot about our ancestors from the things they were buried with.

Regia Anglorum, a UK-based reenactment group, which portrays the life and history of the Vikings, Saxons, and Normans in the Early Middle Ages, decided to imagine what would modern people take to the afterlife if they were sent off according to old traditions.

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Image credits: regiaanglorum

“Creating new content during the pandemic has been difficult,” Jenn Peters, press and publicity officer at Regia Anglorum, told Bored Panda. “Normally, our summer weekends would have been full of battles and events where we experience and educate others about early medieval life.”

The lockdown, however, has really limited their activities, and the group has been setting each other photo challenges and games to keep themselves connected and entertained. “I wanted a challenge that could recreate what we see in grave finds but with things we had at our disposal, so I posed our members the question, ‘what would your medieval grave look like?'” Peters recalled the origins of this series.

Image credits: regiaanglorum

She explained that burying goods with the deceased is one of humanity’s earliest traditions. “The universal belief across many world cultures was that you needed to bring items from your current life with you into the afterlife. Much of what we know from history comes from what archaeologists can glean from what the dead wanted to take with them. Famously, we can think of the tomb of Tutankhamun, the Terracotta Army, the ship burial of Sutton Hoo, and so on.”

Image credits: regiaanglorum

But the tradition of interring bodies with grave goods ended with the gradual Christianisation of Europe. According to Peters, the practice died out because Christian heaven doesn’t allow baggage. But many of the comments under their post were from people acknowledging they still would like to be buried this way, for example, holding onto sentimental things of their loved ones who had passed on.