Archaeologists just unearthed a 2,000 year old mass grave in Denmark and the conclusions they’re drawing from what they found paint a picture of some pretty gruesome war rituals. The bodies in the grave are victims of a battle fought 2,000 years ago by barbarian Germanic tribes in Northern Europe.
PNAS The skeletal remains in the mass grave discovered in the Alken Enge wetlands in Jutland, Denmark gives archaeologists the earliest direct evidence of conflict among the Germanic peoples. Though scientists aren’t sure what they were fighting about, they think they’re getting a clearer understanding of what took place after the battle was waged. From Newsweek: This one may have killed about 380 people, mostly men, which the archaeologists think means that the battle was important enough to pull together people from several villages. Many of the victims don’t seem to have survived war wounds before, suggesting that they weren’t experienced fighters.
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PNAS They died of wounds inflicted by lances, swords and maybe axes, and some seem to have been killed after having been captured. But here’s where it gets truly strange: The warriors didn’t die at the wetlands. Instead, the archaeologists believe the battlefield was somewhere nearby. Their corpses were left there for six months or a year, during which animals, likely including wolves, scavenged them and the flesh rotted away. People crossed the battlefield gathering the cleaned bones. Some of them arranged nearly four hip bones threaded along a wooden stick like beads, and they carried the remains to the wetland and dropped them in the water, which would have been at least six feet deep at the time. And there the bones remained, buried in the wetlands and spread across an area of about a quarter square mile, until investigations began in the 1950’s and again 2012 and 2014.
PNAS So why were the bones moved from the battlefield? Agains from Newsweek: Based on their findings, the archaeologists believe they’ve found proof that ancient cultures in the area had formal, careful practices to clean battlefields and handle human remains. “This is ‘memory work’ after the battle,” Peter Bogucki, an anthropologist at Princeton University who wasn’t involved in the research, told National Geographic. “They are deliberately trying to create some collective memory of the event.” To learn more about this archaeological discovery, check out the paper in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.