It would be just as easy to consecrate an IKEA shopping bag as a shrine or a piece of turf – so I don’t see anything sacrilegious or anything to be much indignant about. This story from The Local:
The Kläckeberga church is using Ikea bags to store the remains of around 80 people who were once buried under the floorboards. The macabre collection, which is almost overflowing from a set of large blue Ikea bags, was found by local woman Kicki Karlén.“There were around 80 skeletons,” she told The Local.
Ikea bags stuffed with 80 skeletons – photo The Local
“I was on the team called in to dig out the bones five years ago,” archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay told The Local.“Our mission was to document and rebury the bones, which may be as much as 500 years old. But the reburial was delayed and I have no idea why. The plan was to rebury them as soon as possible, but that’s up to the church. The county board said they couldn’t leave church ground, and it became complicated.”He explained that the bones were likely reburied in a secondary deposition many years ago in what he called a “bone house”. The collection is mostly skulls and longer bones, he added.While Papmehl-Dufay denied storing the bones in the Ikea bags himself, he admitted that it sounded like an efficient storage technique.“It’s not standard practice, definitely not for archaeologists, but the Ikea bags aren’t actually that bad. They’d be great for stopping the moulding process. But it can’t be that good to have them in the basement for so long.”
But what will future archaeologists and anthropologists make of the bags (which may well survive) when they are rediscovered in a few hundred years time. Possibly of the existence of an IKEA cult (which would not be so far from the truth)? With strange burial rituals? or perhaps that the Swedish church was a department within IKEA?
The k2p blog 