Posted on 03/12/2010 4:37:55 PM PST by atomic conspiracy
The captives, all well built young men in their late teens and early 20s, were herded to the place of execution. Fifty-four in total, their heads were hacked off and stacked neatly in a pile. The bodies were tossed into a pit where they remained a tangle of limbs and headless torsos until archaeologists following the route of a new road stumbled across the remains last year. Not the killing fields of Iraq or the Balkans but the Ridgeway, near Weymouth, an ancient track across the now tranquil Dorset countryside, where one thousand years ago a long forgotten massacre took place. The victims, a mystery when the discovery of the mass grave was first revealed in The Times, have been identified. They were Viking raiders who had come to Britain in search of slaves and plunder. The discovery, during construction of a relief road for sailing events in the 2012 Olympics, led to a host of theories. At first it was thought they were Iron Age warriors killed by the invading Roman Legions during fighting for Maiden Castle, Britain’s largest hill fort. That theory was ruled out when radio carbon tests dated the bones to between AD910 and AD1030, a thousand years later. Now tests on isotopes in the enamel of their teeth has found the men came from further afield. They had sailed across the North Sea from what is now Scandinavia. At least one of the Norse men had lived much of his life inside the Arctic Circle. Study of the bones has revealed the brutality of their deaths. Their heads were not cleanly parted from their shoulders with the swing of an executioners’ axe, but hacked off with swords as the naked warriors tried to defend themselves with their bare hands.
(Excerpt) Read more at timesonline.co.uk ...
Not if they were stupid drunk! (And can the archaeologists tell us that?)
Dey vas uncles uv mine.
Note the clue that their heads were found not to be attached to their shoulders, but found nearby...perhaps they had, after death, simply fallen out of their arse.
“Pointless to apply today’s standards to the Middle Ages.”
Except, well, the Vikings WERE mauraders and did rape and pillage and well, could make one mad, even if it WAS the Middle Ages.
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