While excavating the ruination of a mediaeval monastic retreat on a tiny island off the slide of the Channel island of Guernsey , archaeologists amount across what looked like the grave of one of the religious inhabitants . But when they unearthed the tomb , the researchers found not the torso of a monk , but somethingfar more perplexing : the remains of a porpoise .
The team who made the breakthrough are more than a picayune baffled by what they have discover , in what to all intent and design attend like a 14th - 100 grave accent . “ It ’s very peculiar , I do n’t know what to make of it , ” States of Guernsey archaeologist Philip de Jersey toldThe Guardian . In the 35 years he ’s worked as an archaeologist , de Jersey has never escort anything like it . “ It ’s a wonderful surprisal . ”
The island on which the grave was found , Chapelle Dom Hue , is a little lump of rock music off the west coast of Guernsey . Connected to the mainland by a causeway only during humble tide , it was once a spiritual retirement for monks seeking isolation and consolation during the medieval period , and check the remains of structures once used .
However , the find of the cetacean confuses the picture reasonably . It was not unusual for people to feast on porpoises during the fourteenth one C , but then why would the monks inhume the remains of their dinner on a tiny island in which space is a agiotage ? If they really wanted to dispose of the carcass , the lucid move would have been to chuck it into the sea , which was only 10 meters ( 33 human foot ) from the tomb itself .
“ If they had deplete it or stamp out it for the fatness , why take the trouble to swallow up it ? Some travail was made to create a neat hole , ” de Jerseycontinueds . He suggests that perhaps a Thelonious Sphere Monk was not presuppose to have the animal , or maybe it was being preserve . “ It may have been packed in salt and then for some cause they did n’t come back to it . ”
But there is an alternative , if not slenderly more bizarre hypothesis . It could be that the porpoise may have had some as - yet fuzzy spiritual import to the monk staying on the island . The dolphin is powerfully associated with Christianity , as a internal representation of the fish , but this use of a porpoise is seemingly quite novel .
“ It ’s the slightly whacky kind of thing that you might get in the Iron Age but not in medieval time , ” de Jersey toldThe Guardian .
The remains have been sent off for a marine life scientist to peruse , but it seems that perhaps the porpoise behind the grave accent may never be known .
