‘Now we know where the dead went.’ Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of wars ravaged Europe. Massive armies squared off and massacred each other using cannon and rifle fire and mass cavalry charges that claimed tens of thousands of casualties in hours. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish? In a new book , an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond. Science talked to co-authors Bernard Wilkin, a historian at the State Archives of Belgium, and archaeologist Arne Homann, director of the City Museum of Salzgitter, about the historical trade and its implications. This interview has been edited for concision and clarity. Q: How did this research start? Bernard Wilkin: There have been researchers excavating at Waterloo since 2012, and they have fou...
Source: Science of Aging Knowledge Environment - Category: Geriatrics Source Type: research