I promised strange and unsettling stories in the lead up to Halloween - here's one about a discovery with finds made public made just this very year.
That's Lake Mossø in East Jutland, Denmark - pretty, huh? I can think of worse places to die... THREAD
That's Lake Mossø in East Jutland, Denmark - pretty, huh? I can think of worse places to die... THREAD
People have known *something* happened at Lake Mossø for a while. Over the 20th century, Iron Age finds turned up that indicated that Iron Age tribes were active in the area. It wasn't until 2008, however, that human remains began to be uncovered at Alken Enge, near the lake. /2
82 human skeletons have been put back together from the Lake Mossø excavation. The remains of around 380 individuals have been found. Many, many of these individuals had been dis-articulated post-mortem. 3/
Based on the condition of the bones, they had to belong to warriors - there were males, with fractures on femurs and craniums, as well as blade marks to suggest fighting. It would appear that these were the dead from what was - for the time - a huge battle. /4
Somewhat shockingly for us, there were quite a few very young warriors among the dead - some no older than 12 or 13. They were fighting alongside men from their twenties to late thirties. /5
We don't know who they were. We don't know who they were fighting. We don't know what they were fighting about. Almost everything about this battle remains, for us, a mystery. However, we do know what happened next. /6
The dead from the battle were left there. They were left there for up to a year. Things of value were removed, and the corpses left to the elements, and the wild carrion beasts... 7/
...but that's not the end of it. The victors - at least, we think they were the victors, returned to the site and began dis-articulating the bodies, removing limbs, gathering bones together into groups. /8
Most disturbingly of all, someone had gathered four pelvic bones and placed them on a stake, in some sort of macabre presentation to those coming to the site - or at least that's what some think. /9
What was going on here? What it an attempting to 'release' the souls of essence of the fallen? Was it a ritual humiliation of the dead? Was it a cleansing, or were they marking out the spot as a 'cursed place' due to the battle that had taken place? We simply don't know. /10
To be brutally honest, we'll probably never know what was going on at Alken Enge. All we know is that men fought, died & others saw fit to dispose of their bodies, ritually, by the lake. It won't ever really make as much sense as we want it to - sometimes things just don't. /11
There's a great write-up of the Alken Enge discovery at @NatGeo, if you'd like a good explainer. /12 news.nationalgeographic.com/2018/05/german…
For something more academic and meaty, there's a good journal article c/o @PNASNews here. /13 pnas.org/content/early/…
And finally, as @NEgense suggests, there's a hell of a lot more information and photos here. /14 alkenenge.dk
So, I hope you enjoyed that. I, at any rate, will go to sleep with the shades of Iron Age warriors flitting about the periphery of my mind. An excellent time of year for it. /FIN
