Sky burial - body deterioration

[moriwen1]

Setting: Quasi-middle-ages fantasy (magic is present but irrelevant), desert conditions (similar to New Mexico desert

Comments

[cattraine]

It depends a lot on temperature and predation. For example, a flock of hungry vultures can pick a body clean in less then an hour as with the woman hiker who fell in France. In any case you are going to lose the soft parts first--eyes, mouth, etc. The body will bloat quickly in desert heat and expel fluids and gases before the flesh mummifies. These may help:

http://www.livescience.com/29371-griffon-vultures-devour-hikers-body.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forensic_entomological_decomposition

[xolo]

I always kind of thought the idea of exposing a body on a platform was to have the birds eat all the soft parts.

[spikesjojo]

As I recall, sky burial was more of a plains custom. The whole idea was to let the birds eat the flesh, and nature bleach the bones. After a year or so the bones were gathered and buried. Desert natives bury bodies - and are very superstitious about ghosts so they would not mark or return to the burial site. In the Navajo culture everything owned by the dead person would be burned inside their hogan (including the hogan

[sollersuk]

It was also practised by my own ancestors in Britain, which is the main reason why so little is known about Iron Age people and post-Roman people. The bodies seem to have been left out in the outskirts of the settlements; main scavengers were apparently birds, mostly ravens, and foxes (wolves didn't normally come that close to where people lived). Having experienced the olfactory effects of a mouse dying under the floorboards I have problems with the idea of leaving the bodies so close to where people lived.

Natural mummification only occurs if a) the surroundings are dry enough for putrefaction and insect attack not to take place and b) the body is protected from larger creatures by burial or being put in a remote place such as a cave.

[spikesjojo]

I read once that if a modern human were to go back in time the first thing that would knock them out would be the smell - no toilets, no garbage pick up, no baths (okay - Rome had em), animal crap, dead animals, dead people. I think I would want my sense of smell removed if i had to make that journey......but damn I would love to be able to experience it an survive.

[sollersuk]

Actually, it was the industrial processes that were worst - for a lot of time in Britain, for, example, urine was collected for cloth processing and faeces for the preparation of hides. Trades dealing with these things were usually set apart from the chief residential areas, as were woad processing and flax retting, which smelt particularly foul. Most medieval towns had regulations about the removal of rubbish (a lot was recyclable, so the worst was around where animals were slaughtered).

There was some attempt to keep things under control because it was believed that bad smells produced illness (the miasma theory)

[xolo]

Actually, if you do a Google image search for 'sky burial', you'll get a ton of pictures of dead people being eaten by vultures in Tibet. It looks pretty efficient. The birds know that they can get a free meal at the sky burial site, so they basically swarm the body and dispose of it in a few hours. I don't think climate is going to matter a bit if you get the birds used to the idea, since the bodies just won't last long enough to decay or mummify.

[badgermirlacca]

Sky burials don't mummify. They're subject to scavengers. After a month, there won't be a smell--there will be scattered bones.