To the victor go the despoilation , or in some case , the bodies of a vanquished enemy , as the discovery of remnants from an Iron Age engagement in Denmark demonstrates .
Newresearchpublished this workweek in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences show that Alken Enge , a 185 - Accho archaeological site in Denmark ’s Jutland peninsula , was the site of a gruesome battle some 2,000 years ago . dig through the marsh , a squad led by Mads Kähler Holst from Aarhus University bring out 2,095 bone , representing at least 82 individuals . The archaeologists have n’t been able to excavate the intact site , but based on what they ’ve seen , they forecast that around 380 individuals were need . The determination represents a antecedently obscure and surprisingly large engagement that happened at the dawn of the first hundred AD and featured a post - battle rite not seen before among Iron Age Germanic tribes .
Some six to 12 months after the fight , somebody — peradventure the conquerors — dismembered the partially decomposed fall down warrior , crush their skulls , and arranged their bones onto hefty galvanic pile . In one extreme lawsuit , four pelvic bone were strung together on a tree diagram branch . Eventually , the remains were flip in a nearby lake , some weighed down by stones that were brought in from far away . The incident hap in a Teutonic neighborhood of northerly Europe during the Roman Period , but the exact identity of the tribe and the the great unwashed need is unnamed . The violence conduct onto the idle indicate it was done to flaunt the triumph and demean the vanquished , but the exact determination of this “ unionized and ritual clearing of a field ” remains unclear .
The 2,095 castanets were find attractively preserved in peat and lake sediments , and they belong to almost solely to males . Most were adult man , but some were as young as 13 and 14 and as old as 60 . Eleven bones were classified as female , which propose some women participated in the affray . carbon 14 dating places the fight to between 2 BC and 54 advert — a tumultuous sentence when the Roman Empire enter on northerly enlargement , and rival and more and more militaristic Germanic tribes frequently clashed .
Analysis of the ivory revealed unhealed hurt , including sharp , blunt , and infiltrate trauma . Some os were broken . Weapon smash were predominantly keep on the right side of the bodies , with very few around the midsections ; the soldier were belike holding shields with their leftover arm . Analysis also showed that animals were gnawing on the os for about six months to a yr after the conflict — a sign of the zodiac that the bodies were left to moulder for a prolong full stop prior to the “ cleaning . ”
So what happened ?
With no written record of the incident , it ’s difficult to know , but it ’s possible that Romanic soldiers , fresh from their crushing defeat at the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest , massacre this Germanic tribe as part of the Roman Empire ’s ensuing punitive effort . Indeed , the incident happen at the peak of Romanist N expansion , which was often met with ferocious local impedance — and why Romans referred to their not - so - friendly Teutonic neighbors as “ boor . ” The battle site at Alken Enge could very well be the remains of one of those punitive campaigns .
That said , there ’s absolutely no physical evidence to propose papist troops were imply . All weapon recoup from the site were made with the local Germanic style , and the absence of healed injuries on the dead suggests the soldiers had very little premature battle experience . Peter Bogucki , a Princeton University archeologist who was n’t involve in the new study , toldto National Geographic that it was potential “ barbaric - on - barbarian ” action .
“ It ’s indigenously generated . This continues a pattern of endemic , intergroup violence in the area that goes back into prehistoric culture , ” Bogucki say . “ It ’s just that the groups grow gravid and larger , and the weapons got more and more lethal . ”
Indeed , the evidence uncovered at this site point to the growing militarization of the Teutonic region at the time . The size of this army was disproportional to the typical size of Germanic Iron Age villages , which suggest newfound organization and leadership , and the practice of recruiting soldiers from far away .
https://gizmodo.com/human-skulls-mounted-on-stakes-found-at-8-000-year-old-1822936885
As to why the bodies were dismantled and arranged in such a specific style , that remains a whodunit . But the stringing of the pelvic osseous tissue on a branch may have been some material body of intimate humiliation , the researchers write . These kind of “ trophies ” are not uncommon , withother examplesappearing elsewhere in history .
[ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences ]
Ancient romeanthropologyArchaeologyHistoryScience
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