One surprise that emerged from the muck during the draining: 14 tomb markers in the form of Doric columns bearing tablets carved with epitaphs of the Cividal family and their seal showing Samson fighting a lion.
The Senegambian stone circles are a later African form of tomb markers.
These strange, large tomb-markers, called hogbacks because of their shape, are unique to the British Isles, the product of an exclusively British-Viking culture.
Lower down the social scale in the same period, terracotta haniwa figures, as much as a metre high, were deposited on top of aristocratic tombs as grave markers, with others left inside, apparently representing possessions such as horses and houses for use in the afterlife.
(And without a proper tomb, or sêma — a "sign" or grave marker — a dead person could not hope for postmortem recognition, some sign that he or she had once lived and died).
Ostentatious tombs are particularly irksome, he said, because many Chinese find even a simple grave marker beyond their means.
And the Keats tomb, Keats marker, is my favorite by far in this cemetery.
A chilling Israeli newspaper cartoon today showed rows of grave markers, each bearing the inscription, "Joseph's Tomb".
The church has more than 600 statues, tombs, crypts and markers.
But a few years later, in 1990, Lomberg signed on to help design the warning marker of this tomb of the Cold War.
