If You See Stones Piled On A Grave, This Is What It Means

As you stroll around the average cemetery, you’ll see an interesting mix of graves. Some feature huge headstones, some sport stone angels and crosses, others have more modest decorations. On some you’ll see flowers, on others photos and cards. But your eye may be caught by a stranger decoration: little stones adorn some of the graves. You might ask yourself why, and the reason’s profound and powerful.

The flowers in the cemetery range from fresh blooms to wilting plants that’ve lost their color. But it seems that some people have chosen a more lasting tribute: pebbles. It’s true that they don’t have the bright hues of your average bouquet, but they’ll stay the same for, well, years, as long as they’re left untouched.

But while we all recognize why mourners leave a flower or two, most of us likely don’t know what the stones are for. Are they some kind of memorial? Are they intended to be some kind of artwork? It doesn’t seem likely. They don’t form shapes or pictures. They’re just pebbles, seemingly cast without thought.

And they aren’t a rare sight. You can view stones on graves in just about any cemetery across the United States, and in many graveyards around the world as well. It seems a strange way to mark out a place of rest, but it’s still common. Some graves have many pebbles, while others have just a few. But why?

Well, floral tributes are still the kind you’ll find most commonly by a grave. Blooms continue to decorate many a burial plot. And they have done since ancient times. In a ceremony known as zoai, the Greeks paid tribute to their fallen troops by leaving unopened flowers at their graves.

And then the mourners waited. Should the flowers appear, it meant that the deceased person’s soul was at peace. The Romans liked the idea as well, so they incorporated it into their own culture. They viewed the flowers as an offering to placate ghosts. And just in case, they liked to make the grave area into a sort of garden, to be a nice place for the departed to hang out.

But it seems that even the Greeks didn’t invent the idea of placing flowers on a grave. No, the concept has actually been around for many thousands of years. In Israel, researchers have discovered the remains of blooms, including sage and mint, at grave sites that date back more than 13,000 years.

Yep, the team of scientists were looking at graves in Raqefet Cave, which was used in the very distant past to bury the departed. And they found places where plants had been pressed into the linings of the plots. Then they dated the remains with radiocarbon techniques. Incredible work!

But even this site isn’t the oldest. No, in 2010 ancient pollen turned up in Northern Spain’s El Mirón Cave. Remarkably, these objects dated to some 16,000 years ago, way back in the Upper Paleolithic Period. Now that’s a very long time ago!

But what does this ancient pollen mean? Well, an expert at the University of the Basque Country has answers. María José Iriarte-Chiapusso explained in an academic paper that it showed the people who’d lived in Cantabria “put whole flowers on the tomb.” It isn’t certain what exactly the flowers were for, though.

So the tradition of leaving flowers at graves clearly dates back many thousands of years. Yet this habit didn’t really take off in the U.S. before the passing of Abraham Lincoln. Apparently, people wanted to show their distress at his death, and they settled on using the likes of roses and lilacs. After that, it was a short step to this developing into a custom.

On other graves, you might see coins. But don’t touch them if you catch sight of these items. They’ve been left to commemorate fallen veterans. You might notice that they’re specific denominations: pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. And there’s a reason for those precise coins to be left on American tombstones.

For example, it’s said that pennies are left by those who didn’t serve when they visit the graves of somebody who did. This just lets everyone know that a visitor stopped by. And a nickel has a more personal meaning. Yes, it tells other visitors that you underwent basic training with the person you’re honoring.

Dimes show a closer relationship. They demonstrate that you both served together. Yet that’s nothing compared to a quarter. Those show that you were there when the person whose grave you’re visiting lost their life. So the impact on a relative if they spot a quarter on a tombstone must be enormous.

We can’t be certain when this tradition started, but there’s an answer that seems to fit: it could’ve been during the Vietnam War. Given how disliked that war proved to be, vets spending time at their brothers in arms’ graves might’ve ended in trouble. So just quietly dropping a coin could have been a memorial that didn’t invite any conflict.

And there was even more to it than that. The coins were viewed as a way to shout a round for those who’d died, in the hope that one day you’d enjoy that drink with one another in the hereafter. But get this: American troops didn’t actually invent this custom. No, the Romans also honored their fallen comrades with coins.

One of the oldest markers of a burial site is of course the gravestone. They’ve been around for more than 5,000 years. But they weren’t always the kind of objects that we’re used to seeing nowadays. No, they were sometimes massive blocks of stone that marked whole graveyards, not just one plot.

In the past, people thought that if you didn’t want a spirit to return from the grave, you had to put a big weight on top of it! Over time, placing rocks on graves evolved into stone caskets. Tombstones were the lids of those tombs, while the inscribed section was known as the headstone. Of course, they all tend to mean the same thing today.

We didn’t always use stone, though. Nope, in the U.S. headstones were fashioned from wood in the Civil War era, because decent stone was in short supply. The war ate up so many materials that there was little left over for grave sites. But wood doesn’t last well, obviously, so after the conflict ended there was a shift to something a bit longer lasting.

The go-to material was initially marble, and it’d been a former favorite, too. To be precise, it’d seen a great deal of use in ancient Greece. The Greeks didn’t just sculpt each other out of blocks of marble; they also used the stone for graves. And marble’s certainly beautiful – but it doesn’t tend to last so well.

While marble looks nice indoors, as soon as you let the weather get to it, it erodes rapidly. Worst of all, you can’t read inscriptions once they’ve worn away. And when the world industrialized, acid rain followed. It’s terrible for marble! So the Victorians liked granite instead because it was much sturdier.

But not everyone uses headstones. Or even graves, actually. Zoroastrians place their deceased loved ones on top of a “Tower of Silence.” Seems a strange place to leave a body, right? Well, not if you want vultures to dispose of them – and yes, that’s precisely what Zoroastrians want.

You don’t see Towers of Silence much these days, though. That’s because they aren’t really practical in big cities. In fact, they’re banned nearly everywhere, including in Iran, which is the native country of Zoroastrianism. So if you want to see one – really? – you’d best go to Mumbai in India.

The Zoroastrians – or Parsis as they’re known in India – aren’t the only people who favor open-air funerals. Tibetan Buddhists like to give human remains back to nature. And the best way to do that is to leave the cadaver out in the open. We’re sure the vultures are grateful for this Buddhist custom.

Another group of people who don’t bother with the whole burial aspect of a funeral are the Igorot of the Philippines, though they do use coffins. These people hang the coffins from the side of a cliff. And they sure aren’t hiding them! They decorate the coffins in bright colors and festoon them with chairs, graffiti and crosses. Yes, chairs.

Of course, burial in the ground remains a popular method of disposing of bodies. Muslims inter their deceased – at least the men do, with women usually being barred from attending. Muslim graves are laid out so that the loved one’s remains can lie facing Mecca. They’re put to rest in a somber ceremony, with those present saying a prayer.

When the remains have been laid in the grave, the gravediggers put wood and stones on top of them, in order that no earth touches them. With more prayers, the mourners then one by one toss in soil. Muslim tombs are topped with plain stone because Islamic codes forbid the use of elaborate markers.

But though Muslims put small stones inside the grave, they don’t decorate burial sites with pebbles. No, it turns out that adorning burial plots with these objects is a Jewish custom. They’re much preferred to flowers. In fact, if you go to a Jewish cemetery, you’ll likely see few flowers, if any, as they’re frowned on by religious authorities.

Yes, the Jewish custom’s to leave a single stone when you visit a grave. And this is a tradition so ancient that no one knows for sure why it’s done. There are lots of different ideas about how it became a tradition, though, and it won’t be surprising that the first one we look at is religious in origin.

This theory states that in Jerusalem, back during Biblical times, the kohanim, or priests, weren’t allowed to get close to a dead body. If they did, it was thought to taint them. So the local people started to put stones on graves to let the kohanim know what they had to avoid.

It’s assumed that otherwise the kohanim wouldn’t have known, as graves were usually unmarked at the time. So the people of Jerusalem would build piles of rocks to mark these sites. People who passed the grave would place another stone there, which is exactly what Jews do to this day. There are piles that date back many centuries in graveyards in Jerusalem and other ancient Middle Eastern cities.

As we mentioned, many Jews don’t favor using flowers during burial rites. They actually tend to think of flowers as representing the presence of life, not its absence. But stones don’t wither away. So they’re seen as a fitting symbol of those who’ve left us, indicating that these people’s presence continues among the living. It’s a way of creating a lasting bond.

If you’ve ever been to Jerusalem and visited the Western Wall, you’ll have seen pieces of paper stuffed into cracks. But you may also have noticed that where space ran short, people put their note on the floor, fastened in place with a rock. Well, another theory is that mourners adopted the same practice, leaving notes for the departed. In time, the written messages went out of fashion, but the paperweights didn’t.

Another possibility is a similar idea to the gravestone. Jewish tradition suggests that your spirit stays in your burial site. And people wanted to ensure this happened. One way of doing so was to make sure the spirit couldn’t escape by blocking the exit with stones. An extra bonus is apparently that the same pebbles scare off monsters.

But of all the suggested explanations, there’s one that seems particularly resonant. The Hebrew term for “pebble” can be translated as “bond.” Which seems weird, until you learn that the pebble’s a symbol of the connection between people. And when you go to visit a loved one’s grave, seeing a pile of stones reminds you that your relative’s still remembered by others as well as you.

Deeper still is the explanation for the common inscription on Jewish gravestones: the Hebrew letters taf, nun, tsadi, bet, hey. These are short for “teheye nishmato tsrurah b’tsror ha- chayyim.” This is usually understood to mean “May his soul be bound up in the bonds of eternal life.” But the word tsror in the middle of that sentence has a double meaning.

Yes, tsror translates as pebble. In years past, shepherds used pebbles to count their animals. One pebble for each sheep, so they’d always know how many there were. By extension, for each person, there’s a pebble in God’s sling. So perhaps the stones on graves represent the spirits of us all, connected together as an act of memory.

Jews aren’t the only people to have used stones as grave markers. Celtic tribes did, too. Piles of rocks have been used by them for millennia to mark out special places. The Scots called them càrn in the Gaelic language, which translates as “rocks in a heap,” and the word in English for them is “cairns.”

Scotland’s still dotted with cairns, in fact. They signify all sorts of things, but one of their most important uses was to serve as memorials to fallen warriors. Each member of a clan would leave a stone in the pile before they went to war, and of course only those who survived could take their stone back afterwards.

Scots don’t generally leave stones on graves these days, but the tradition of using a cairn to signify a burial place has left a phrase in Scots Gaelic. It’s “Cuiridh mi clach air do chàrn,” which means “I’ll place a rock on your cairn.” Now that’s a beautiful way of saying that you’ll remember a lost comrade.