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Tuesday, April 09, 2024

‘Now we know where the dead went.’ Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of wars ravaged Europe. Massive armies squared off and massacred each other using cannon and rifle fire and mass cavalry charges that claimed tens of thousands of casualties in hours. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?
-WiscoDave

18 comments:

  1. Reuse & Recycle!
    I wondered if the sea life thrived after battles that dumped a lot of bodies in the water. Provided the animals didn't get killed in the fracas too.
    Jerry

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    1. my dad was in the navy in WW2. almost start to finish. he used to tell us about packs of sharks that followed the fleet. hell they even caught a few of them to add to the mess meals. but off the "canel" or iron bottom sound as it was called, there where hundreds of sharks that feasted of the bodies.

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  2. I try to learn something new every day. I literally never heard of this till now. Wow.

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  3. Yet another reason to be cremated (on your terms).

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    1. If you're dead, how do you know you've been roasted? Maybe the crematory takes 'em in the front door and sends 'em out the back door to the medical school and gives your next of kin a n urn filled with kitty litter.

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  4. Ashes to ashes....what are ashes? Look it up youselves.

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    1. Ha ! I now have a new word "Ashhole"!!

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  5. If something was made from the bones of a clown, did the people ask: Does this taste funny to you?

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  6. Apparently at Stalingrad, there are still bones and equipment sticking up out of the ground. My grandfather was captured there.

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  7. does it occur to anyone else that maybe the "history" is a lie?

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    1. Every single day. You can write the most well-researched paper, full of primary sources, but people will remember what Hollywood shows them.

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  8. I've been to many battlefields especially the ones of the War between the States. Been to Kings Mtn battlefield. One of the plaques there said people would not go there after the battle as wolves were eating the dead.
    https://www.battlefields.org/learn/revolutionary-war/battles/kings-mountain
    sammy

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  9. So were there sugar beet factories cropping up around Auchswitz in the 50's?

    I'm sorry. That's bad. I know.

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    1. What's really bad is reading up on the actual, serious history of the place. 90% of what they tell you about it is an outright fabrication.

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  10. On the order of 70K were killed at Waterloo. While some were missed, they didn't normally leave the bodies on the battlefield.

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    1. What did they do with 70,000 bodies then? Just snap their fingers and make them disappear?

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  11. Some battlefields, like Gettysburg and Culloden, have warnings about disturbing bones that occasionally work to the surface.

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  12. You’ve never eaten English food, have you? Explains much

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