Teeth and wounds identify who lay in mass graves from Athens to Vindobona
Tooth enamel places most shackled men from Phaleron in Attica, while skulls from Visby and a mass grave near Vindobona show how weapons and wounds distinguish episodes of organized violence.
Science··Evening
Shackled men at Phaleron grew up in Attica
The Phaleron burial ground in ancient Attica holds 79 adult male skeletons across three graves dated to the seventh and sixth centuries BCE. According to Phys.org, strontium isotopes locked into tooth enamel during childhood place the great majority of shackled men from the three mass graves in the local population, and the local share is similarly high for the burial ground as a whole. Enamel forms in childhood and then stops changing, so its strontium ratio reflects the geology of the water and food where a person grew up rather than where they died. Lead author Julianne R. Stamer and colleagues write that the violence the site records was directed primarily inward, shifting the reading away from captured foreigners and towards conflict inside the community. Who these men were remains unknown; the analysis weakens an origin outside Attica without supplying an identity. The study appeared in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. Here, shackles and mass burial point chiefly to local victims: tooth enamel places most of them in Attic geology as they grew up.[1]
A spiked club made the square holes in the Visby skulls
According to Live Science, Patrick Randolph-Quinney of Uppsala University described an analysis identifying a spiked club as the weapon that made the square wounds at the 1361 Battle of Visby at the European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. The work has not been peer reviewed. The battle on Gotland in July 1361 left 1,800 Gotlandic and 300 Danish dead; the men were buried in their armour in a mass grave first excavated in the early 20th century. Early excavators linked the square holes to a lance head or an arrow; Ronja Bågling of Uppsala floated a spiked club instead. The presentation said the club's heavy damage matched the grave injuries. One skull reads as an ax blow interrupted by a spiked-club impact, suggesting more than one attacker. Randolph-Quinney says the conventional picture of Visby defenders as poorly trained boys and old men deserves re-examination. Because the analysis was presented at a conference rather than published, the reconstruction and fracture criteria remain outside a reader's reach.[2]
Near Vindobona, 129 young men with many groin wounds
Sheridan Strang of the archaeology firm Novetus told the same Berlin meeting that the 129 skeletons, all male and aged 18 to 35, mostly show violent trauma inflicted around the time of death. Live Science reports the grave under a football pitch at Hasenleitengasse outside Vienna; excavated in 2024 and dated to the first or second century. The burial is extremely disorganised, with no typical grave goods and only a few weapons. One lance head was still lodged in a pelvis. Sharp trauma spreads across the skeletons, blunt trauma clusters mostly on skulls, and projectile trauma is largely confined to the groin. Strang's most likely reading is a ground attacker aiming a throwing lance at a gap in a rider's armour. Strang said some may have been Roman military personnel and that the grave might mix Romans with a Germanic group. The work is not yet peer reviewed, so the war-dead reading remains provisional. Where Phaleron uses tooth enamel to separate local from non-local victims, Visby and Vindobona use wound shape to separate weapons and attack order.[3], [1], [2]
