Medieval mass grave hints at gruesome secret

(CBS News) A gruesome mass grave found in southern England may be the final resting place of some of the most feared marauders of the 11th century.

Archeologists say the remains may belong to Viking mercenaries, who were buried in a burial pit in what now is the English town of Dorset. Isotope testing on the men's teeth links their origin to Scandinavia. That's where the easy clues end.

A better article on this same subject is here:

http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2012/01/archeologists-viking-massacre-came-to-unexpected-ending/1

How it sometimes ended, suggests an archeological study in the current Oxford Journal of Archeology. In the study led by Mark Pollard of the United Kingdom’s University of Oxford, archeologists thought they had uncovered the victims of England’s St. Brice’s Day Massacre in 1002 A.D.

The 1002 massacre was “a most just extermination” in the words of King Aethelred the Unready, of Danes cluttering up the English countryside that took place at St. Frideswide’s Church, now Christ Church Cathedral, in Oxford. Scandinavian Viking raiders had harried the English coast in the Middle Ages, expeditions that lasted two centuries, creating long-lasting friction between Danes and Saxons. The massacre victims (who reportedly included the sister of Denmark’s King Sweyn Forkbeard, who along with Aethelred the Unready, is worth mentioning just for the sake of wondering why kings today have such boring names) had walled themselves for sanctuary inside a church, which the townsfolk burned down to murder them. “Afterwards, with God’s aid, it was renewed by me,” King Aethelread noted in a royal proclamation on rebuilding the church.

So, when archeologists found the bones of at least 33 men, and two teenagers, in an ancient ditch near the massacre site four years ago, some supposed they had found some of the massacre victims. “The skeletal remains were dumped in a mass grave, and had clearly been thrown in one on top of another,” said the study, noting the bones showed, “multiple serious perimortem (around the time of death) injuries, most commonly multiple blade wounds, as well as many healed wounds, suggesting they may have been professional soldiers..”

“Several of the skeletons showed evidence of charring, which was not reflected in the local grave fill, suggesting that they had been exposed to burning before burial – an observation which heightened the suspicion that these may be some of the victims of the burning of St Frideswide’s Church.”

“Taken together, this evidence left little doubt that these bodies were the result of a mass execution,” said the authors.

But something a bit unexpected turned up when the archeologists tried carbon dating of the bones from three of the skeletons.

“The radiocarbon dates are very consistent,” found the researchers, “...but with calibrated age ranges which do not encompass ‘expected’ date of AD 1002.” Instead the age range of the bones was somewhere from 940 to 970 A.D.

Well. Perhaps the seafood diet of Danes might result in a shift in the type of carbon in their bones. This “marine reservoir effect” that can throw off carbon dating by as much as 400 years, the team suggested.

To figure out what sort of diet the dead men ate, the researchers poured acid on the bones to collect collagen and analyzed their oxygen and strontium contents, which should reveal a diet either heavy on the fish (Vikings) or heavy on the grains (English). They also looked at similar chemistry in a few of the skeletons’ molars. The results confirmed that the men ate a diet heavy in fish that looks more Scandinavian than English, but didn’t budge the age estimate much.

So, what did we have in the ditch at Oxford? A pretty bad day for some Viking raiders, conclude the researchers:

“...we feel encouraged to conclude that this group might also represent a mixed group of professional soldiers, perhaps a raiding party with Scandinavian origins, which could include Denmark and southern Norway or Sweden. That it represents the outcome of the documented massacre at St Frideswide’s Church in AD 1002 currently seems unlikely. The evidence of perimortem (around the time of death) burning and trauma is consistent with the story of the burning of the church, but the presence of healed blade wounds is more likely in a group of professional warriors, rather than in a group of residents of Danish extraction rounded up and executed. At the moment it seems more plausible to suggest that what we have is a group of raiders captured and executed, probably around the later tenth century, but not necessarily directly related to the St Brice’s Day Massacre.”

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