Monday, June 8, 2009

400 Year Old Urine

I wonder what people will dig up three or four hundred years from now and think "those people in the 21st century sure were backward and superstitious."

From MSNBC...
During the 17th century in England, someone urinated in a jar, added nail clippings, hair and pins, and buried it upside-down in Greenwich, where it was recently unearthed and identified by scientists as being the world's most complete known "witch bottle."

This spell device, often meant to attract and trap negative energy, was particularly common from the 16th to the 17th centuries, so the discovery provides a unique insight into witchcraft beliefs of that period, according to a report published in the latest British Archaeology.

Massey believes witch bottles "emphasize just how frightened people were of the 'black arts' — the early settlers even took their superstitions to the New World with them as excavated witch bottles demonstrate."

The general time period of the bottle coincides with the Salem Witch Trials, which happened in late 1600's America.

Archaeologist Mike Pitts, the editor of British Archaeology, told Discovery News, "The discovery of something so apparently bizarre, indicating a clear belief in witchcraft and forces that have nothing at all to do with conventional, approved religion, remind us that early modern England did not belong to the same world we now inhabit."

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