14.
Ok, so this happened 7 years ago. I was studying for my Archaeology degree, attending my first ever fieldschool which was part of my course. One of the Geophysics lecturers was visiting with his young daughter, she was around 5 or 6 I think. As he spoke with my graduate supervisor whilst taking a look at our trench, the daughter spent a lot of time standing on the spoil piles at the edge of the trench.
Anyway, they go home after a while. The next day we find a burial. It’s nicely articulated and well preserved with large fist-sized stones lining the edge of it’s cut. So here’s the weird thing.
The day after we find the remains, the geophys lecturer turns up at site with some odd news. In the evening after their visit, the little girl had drawn a sketch of a skeleton. That’s not so weird you might think, a kid being inspired by the thought of digging in the ground and archaeology to sketch a skelly. Thing is it gets odder. She managed to draw (a full day before we found any remains) what looked like a plan drawing of the skeleton in situ. It was fully articulated, with the arms crossed over the chest and the legs laid out straight. There were also stones drawn around the remains forming the edge of the grave. When the dad brought the sketch to site, this child’s drawing matched up ridiculously closely to the official plan drawing that I was making.
It wasn’t just the articulation of the skeleton that really got us, but the positioning of the stones lining the grave. They were spaced quite deliberately apart, with 3 massive ones lining the head. The kids sketch had exactly the same layout.
The geophys guy swore he wasn’t winding us up, or that he had brought his daughter over to sketch it at some point.
He told us after, that he went back home and asked his daughter why she drew that sketch. She said that she just wanted to draw the people that were there. We found a second associated burial a month later.
