Words of warning about radiocarbon dating medieval human bones

Beginning in the thirteenth century and culminating approximately one hundred years later, a significant number of religious houses—circa 140—were established in Denmark by the majority of the monastic orders originally founded in Italy, France, and Germany 1 . The general layout of these architectural complexes adhered strictly to the regulations of each respective order, typically comprising a church and three cloister buildings arranged around a central courtyard. Each religious house was accompanied by one or more cemeteries; in certain instances, the monastic residents possessed a burial ground of their own, whereas novices, laypeople, and townsfolk were interred elsewhere. A case in point is the Cistercian monastery at Øm in Jutland, where three distinct cemeteries have been identified 2 , 3 , 4 . The most prestigious burial sites - highly sought after by the residents of the monastery and, consequently, also by affluent townsfolk willing to pay for a burial plot - were frequently located within the church, inside or adjacent to the chapter house, and along the cloister walk. For the current investigation, 27 burials have been selected from these precise locations, each demonstrating a stratigraphical or orientational relationship to the architecture. This relationship encompasses parallelism to the buildings or to other interments.