Author: Bruce Bower / Source: Science News
Club-wielding assailants struck the Scandinavian settlement with devastating violence, slaughtering at least 26 people and leaving the bodies where they fell.
There, the bodies lay for 1,500 years until recovered recently by archaeologists analyzing clues about the Iron Age massacre.It’s unclear why the seaside ringfort of Sandby borg, on the Baltic Sea island of Ӧland, was targeted at a time of political turmoil following the Roman Empire’s fall in Western Europe. Adults, teenagers and children died suddenly and brutally — their skeletons showing bones fractured by clubs, but no defensive wounds, say archaeologist Clara Alfsdotter of Bohuslӓns Museum in Udevalla, Sweden, and her colleagues. When the slaughter was over, the attackers left the sheep and other animals to starve and the valuables untouched, the scientists report in the April Antiquity. No one came back to bury the dead.
MASSACRE CLUE
That’s somewhat unusual: At most other excavated battlefield and massacre sites in Europe, bodies have been found in mass graves (SN: 1/23/16, p. 7). However, 67 farming villagers slaughtered around 7,200 years ago at Austria’s Asparn-Schletz site were also left in place. Circumstances surrounding the attacks on Asparn-Schletz and Sandby borg are poorly understood, making it difficult to compare the two events, says anthropologist Bruno Boulestin of the University of Bordeaux in France, who did not…
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