The death of a medieval Danish warrior. A case of bone trauma interpretation

Abstract

Abstract:In 1934 a grave was found in the church ruins of the Cistercian Abbey at Øm in central Jutland, Denmark (founded in 1172, demolished 1561 AD). The grave contained the skeletal remains of an individual lying in a supine position with the head towards the west. The anthropological analysis revealed that the remains belonged to a young male, aged 25-30 years at death and approximately 162.7 cm tall. He had 9 perimortem sharp force lesions, five of which were cranial and four were postcranial, indicating he suffered a violent death in a swordfight. This paper presents a detailed analysis and description of the individual lesions and their probable effect on the soft tissue, followed by a suggestion for the most likely order of the blows which caused the lesions, and finally a tentative reconstruction of the battle accompanied by photographs. This case illustrates both that forensic pathology can be very useful when applied to an archaeological case and suggests that the forensic pathologist could benefit from examination of ancient cases when interpreting bone lesions in modern cases.

Trauma patterns and injury prevalence in early medieval Säben‐Sabiona, Italy

“…Both sharp force trauma and cranial blunt force trauma were with 43.9% and 3.6% quite common. In archaeological settings, most deliberately inflicted injuries are obtained through sharp force trauma or blunt force trauma (Constantinescu et al, 2017;Forsom et al, 2017;. Alfsdotter and Kjellström (2019) as well as Novak (2007) found multiple cases of sharp force trauma (81.8% and 86%) and to a lesser extent blunt force trauma (18.2% and 14%) in their Medieval populations, which are similar proportions to the present sample.…”

“…Bioarchaeological trauma research is predominantly based on conflict-related sites (Nicklisch et al, 2017;Novak, 2007), case studies (Forsom et al, 2017;Tumler et al, 2019) or more general analyses mentioning bone injuries. Novak and Šlaus (2010), Judd and Roberts (1999) and Agnew et al (2015) also addressed the presence of accident-related injuries.…”

Prone burials and evidence of interpersonal violence: A case study from early medieval Bavaria, Germany

“…Skull fractures are often followed by intracranial hematomas, which may have occurred in the case of this individual. As stated in many studies, targeting the cranium is associated with the intention to kill the victim fast (Cieślik et al, 2017; Forsom et al, 2017; Kanz & Grossschmidt, 2006; Tumler et al, 2019). Both massive strikes to the skull support this theory for individual 115.…”

“…The first is a defensive wound that the victim sustained while it was holding the arm up over the face to protect it, and the second is that he was laying already face down when the trauma was inflicted. In the case of the injuries to the femoral bone, we theorize that the reason for the attack in this location was most likely to immobilize the victim, thus bringing the conflict to an early conclusion (Forsom et al, 2017; Tumler et al, 2019). It is highly likely that the unhealed injury to the cranium played a significant role in the cause of death.…”

Forensic Anthropology and Archaeology in Denmark

“…Based on archeological skeletal material, we conduct research into, for example, health and diseases of past populations [58][59][60][61][62][63][64][65][66][67], trauma [68] dietary habits of the past [46,47], migrations [44], human morphology [69,70]. Based on PMCT scans, we also conduct research into, for example, age estimation [11,71,72], cranial trauma [21][22][23], 3D documentation and virtual reconstruction [27,73,74], 3D printing [75].…”