Gone Medieval - Sandby Borg Massacre: The Evidence

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

When archeologists uncovered a jewellery hoard buried beneath the Iron Age ring fort of Sandby Borg in 2010, their excitement was palpable. Yet little did they know that they had only scratched the surface. As they dug deeper they began to find the remains of a community that had been brutally slaughtered - their wounds evidence of a terrible Early Medieval massacre.In today’s episode of Gone Medieval, Dr Cat Jarman talks to Dr Ludwig Papmehl-Dufay - one of Sandby Borg’s lead archaeologists. Together they discuss the story of the massacre’s victims, exploring how the latest archaeological techniques can peel back the mystery and tell us more about who they were and what actually happened to them.This episode was edited by Joseph Knight and produced by Rob Weinberg.If you’re enjoying this podcast and are looking for more fascinating Medieval content then subscribe to our Medieval Monday newsletter here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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with a brand-new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world, to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit. I'm your host for today, Dr. Kat Jarman. In 2010, archaeologists working on the small island of Erlan in the Baltic Sea off the coast of Sweden made a completely unexpected discovery. At San Borg, one of the island's many ring forts, they discovered human remains dating to around the year 500. But this was no cemetery.

The dead showed signs of being brutally murdered, the victims of a massacre. For 1,500 years the bodies lay there, some shut inside houses, some out in the streets. Nobody came back to bury them. So what happened that day at Sanbiburg and why? And what has new ancient DNA evidence told us about the victims? Today I'm delighted to her with me, one of the archaeologists who has been the key part of the excavations and investigations of Sandiburg right from the start. Dr Ludwig Pat Meldefei is an associate professor in the Department of Cultural Sciences at Linnaeus University in southern Sweden. Welcome to Gone Medieval today, Ludwig.

Thank you so much. It's very good to be here. And I have to say that I've been so fascinated with this site for years and years and years. So I'm really delighted to finally get a chance to question you about it. because there's actually new things happening and everything as well, isn't it? So you're still working on it? Yeah, it is. Actually, we haven't excavated at the site for like five years now or something, but it has been quite a lot of excavations for the past 10 years or so, so we still have a lot of material to work with. Not least the scientific analysis of the skeletal materials, DNA and isotopes coming out. Fantastic. And we're going to get back to that a little bit later on and get some of those, whatever you're allowed to share so far.

But I think we should start a little bit with Sunbi Bogg itself, but actually also even, Biggest story, so Erlan and this part of the world. So we're right at the end of the Roman Empire into the next phase, really. I was hoping that you could tell us a little bit about Erlan at that time. What's happening there? What's the island like? Just a bit of context to start it off, please. Yeah. So I mean, the island of Erlan, for maybe listeners who aren't familiar with it, it's an island in the Baltic Sea in Scandinavia, so it's situated right off the Swedish coast in southeast Sweden. So it's the second largest island in Sweden. We have Gotland, a larger island, a bit further out in the Baltic Sea, and then Erland, which is just a couple of kilometers

from the mainland. So I'm actually on Erland right now, so I see the city of Kalmar on the Swedish mainland from my window now. It's a limestone island, so it's a flat landscape, and it's really rich archaeologically. Like the other big islands in the Baltic Sea, Gotland, Bornholm in Denmark, and also Erland, have a really rich prehistoric archaeological record, Especially the mid-iron edge, the centuries after the birth of Christ and onwards, has a really rich remains, both in terms of visible cemeteries, burial grounds and house foundations, fortifications, but also the finds from these periods are really rich, a lot of gold finds, not least. So it's apparent that maybe in the third, fourth century AD, this was a really densely populated area, if you compare to, for example, the neighboring mainland. From the finds, you can see that people on Erland has had extensive contacts with more distant areas, not least the Roman Empire. We do have a lot of exclusive imported objects, but also Roman gold coins found on the island.

So Erland is actually the area in Scandinavia where the most numerous finds of Roman gold solidity coins. And they have been minted mainly in the 5th century. So it's an idea that people on Erland have spent time traveling down to the Roman Empire doing. something that they got paid for in gold coins, probably connected to the military or the army in some way. A lot of burials have been excavated through the 19th and 20th century, and you can see that there's a really dense concentration to this period from the second, third century, AD up to the early 5th century, and then it drops. So there is an idea that there is something happened in the early 6th century. Some researchers talk about a sudden decrease in population,

other talk about catastrophes and warfare. And this has been a story like since 1930s or something like that. And now in 2010 we discovered something at Saniboy, which put this hypothesis in a new context. Yes, I mean, this discovery is absolutely spectacular and so unusual. And we're going to talk about it more in just a second. But can you just talk me through Sanbibog itself? So we have this fortification.

Is it the only one? Or what did we know about it before, 2010. Yeah, so this is a very interesting kind of site. We call them ring forts. So on the island of Erland today, we know of 16 ring forts, ironated rainforests. So they look a bit different. Some of them are very similar to each other, others. There is variation between them, but still we have this category of ancient remains. We call them ancient fortifications like hill forts. Most of them are some sort of stone walls surrounding or encircling a mountain top. You get them in the thousands along the coast of Sweden.

And most of them date to the mid-iron age, but some of them date already from the Bronze Age and all that. So they are often viewed as signs of political unrest and times of warfare and conflicts. Some of them really look like fortifications. Others are quite small walls and maybe a burial inside. So there's also this discussion. Are they used for military purposes,

or are they more like religious or cultic constructions? And probably there's a big variation in that too. But anyway, Erlan, as I said in the beginning, it's very flat. There are no hill forts on Erlan because Erlan is just limestone. But the fortifications here are of a type. You can almost say they are unique in the sense that you don't get this kind of fortifications anywhere else, actually. So they are on the flat ground and they consist of quite massive stone walls built from limestone.

So the stone walls are maybe four, five, six meters wide and would have been like six meters high, encircling a large area, which in most cases seem to have been filled with settlements. For example, Sanibati, it's a mid-sized ring fort, so encircling an area of maybe 5,000 square meters. And inside the ring wall, we have the remains of 53 houses. So basically, all the area in the interior of the ring wall is filled with stone houses. They actually join walls, so next to each other all the way through, almost like an urban settlement. These 16 ring forts on the island seem to have been built in their fourth or fifth century AD in Scandinavia. In this time, we don't have urban settlements.

The first urban settlements in Scandinavia, usually we talk about early Viking sites such as Birka or Headby or Rebe or stuff like that. That's 300 years later. So the Erland ring forts are really peculiar in that sense. I'm not suggesting they are cities, towns, but they do have this urban character to them. and you don't get that anywhere else in Scandinavia at this time. So I think they're really interesting, and researchers have long been discussing what's the inspiration for the Erland ring forts,

and why were they all built in this period, and how were they used? So in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the ring forts were actually more or less totally excavated, and that's the Eke-Torpe ring fort on the southernmost part of the island, actually really similar in size and layout to Zambi-Boi. There, they could see that it is actually three ring forts on the same spot.

So the first one was built in the 4th century AD, and then only like 100 years later, it was totally rebuilt with a new ring wall, new houses inside. So we talk about EKATOP 1 and EKATOP 2. And this EKATO2 is the one that's basically contemporary with San Bivori, and the layout is almost identical.

EKATOp 2 is used for a couple of hundred years, and then it's abandoned, and four, 500 years later is rebuilt again into a second. third phase in the Scandinavian chronology early Middle Ages, which is like 12th century AD. So anyway, the Eekotorp excavation, that's the only ring for Danola, which has been totally excavated. So what we think we know about these sites is quite a lot based on the Eichotorp excavations. And there they concluded that the first phase was interpreted as a refugee site, built for refugee protection. And then the second phase was interpreted as a permanent

fortified village. And that dates to the late 5th, 36th century. So it was hypothesized that this is a period where the conflicts and warfare has been, to such large extent, a real threat. So they actually have to move into this fortified permanent village. And then for some reason, abandoned later. Now, more recent research have sort of questioned that idea, were they actually permanently inhabited these sites,

or where they may be used for other recess as well. So we have these 16 sites. One of them is more or less totally excavated, but the others are almost not excavated at all. And another really interesting feature we have from this period on the island are ringworm settlements like farms and villages. Because on Erland and Gotland in this period, people built their houses with walls of stone.

And that's not the case in mainland Sweden. If you want to find an iron age house in Sweden, you have to find the post holes beneath the plowsoil. But on Erlan and Gotlan, you can actually see the houses in the terrain. You see the walls like visible structures. So we have quite a good knowledge about the villages and farmsteads. So it's not the case that some people lived in the ring forts, others lived in farmsteads.

It's probably more like the farms and villages had their ring forts as communal places, to maybe places for meetings and gatherings of different sorts. And protection, maybe, but not only protection. So that's really important context, because then we come to Sandiburg and the discovery of the massacre. So talk me through how that was first discovered, because I know you were involved in this project for quite a long time. Yeah, I was actually involved from the very beginning in the sense that, so I did my PhD at Stockholm University. I finished in 2006. And just before I finished, another guy started as a PhD student, and his name was Andreas Wiberi.

And then when I was finished, I moved down to Erland and started to work here. So in 2010, Andreas were working on his PhD, and he wanted to use Sanbibori as a case study for one of the papers in his thesis. Because we knew from aerial photographs already in the 1970s that there were house foundations preserved underneath the grass at Saniboria. So basically, he wanted to test what can we see of these structures with geophysics? since I live here I helped him to do the service in 2010 in the spring I think it was and when we were there serving we noticed that there were a couple of pits dug in the ground at the site so we suspected maybe this actually looks like someone having been doing metal detecting at the site illegally so we reported that to the local antiquarian authorities and they commissioned the local museum to do a metal detecting survey of the whole site just to make sure it if there was there anything left, basically. And during that survey, which was in August 2010, you would expect that some artifacts would appear maybe.

But what they did find there totally blow everyone away because in five different places in the ring fort, they found jewelry deposits containing the most fabulous and fantastic artifacts from late 5th, early 6th century, large silver brooches with gilded decoration and glass beads and silver pendants and all the finger rings of gold and silver, all this shiny stuff. So that find just blow Scandinavian archaeology up a bit. That was like a big sensation.

Large, heavy silver broaches, you don't find it in archaeological excavations. I don't know of a single place where they found more than one of them. And here we had five complete brooches in mint condition and a six half of another brooch. So six brooches of this kind in one. hits, basically. The next year, in 2011, the local museum, Kalmar County Museum, were commissioned to examine the fine spots of these hordes. I think they excavated like two days or something in the first year. So they excavated small trenches in three of these fine spots for these jewelry deposits. And in all three trenches, they could see, first of all, that the deposits were

tucked away inside houses, like in the corner of the house, like inside the door to the right, in the dark corner of the house. But in all the three trenches, they also found human remains. So that was like a shock from this brilliant shiny jewelry to brutal death in one blow. So from 2011, Kama County Museum made annual excavations at the site. And this image with human remains and the contrast with the shiny jewelry, it just continued. The first year, the human remains was like in one trench. it was a tooth, and you can drop a tooth,

but in another trench it was two feet protruding from the trench wall. So there they could see that's actually a skeleton lying on the floor in the house. So from then on, it's a place where almost everywhere we dig, we find human remains, and it's not buried people but slain. Yeah, because that's not, it's cemetery, that's not a grave, and we wouldn't expect that, because this is inside the houses in a very sort of densely packed, as you described it at the beginning, which is extremely unusual.

So then more was excavated. And tell me what was then found about these bodies in the end. Yes, I mean, the Sunbe-Borri project was not like we sat down and sort of, now we're going to do a real cool archaeological project about this site. It was rather like we find something really, really unexpected and interesting and unusual. And we just have to continue. We found these two feet. and the following year we had to take a trench to uncover that skeleton.

And as we did that, the head and shoulders of another person appeared. So we had to take that as well, you know, and we just kept coming more and more human remains. So in the end, that single house, one of 53 houses in the ring fort. That first house that we excavated turned out to contain the bodies of six individuals and parts of another three individuals. So actually nine individuals in that house alone. In the end, currently, we have excavated 10% of the surface. So we have excavated three houses completely and also parts of the street and all that.

So from these 10% and the three houses, we have approximately 30 individuals. One third of them approximately are more or less complete bodies, so nine complete bodies. So in all three houses, we have excavated, we have found bodies of slain people. in the streets, it's mainly scattered remains. So it seems that at least some of the houses probably have been more protected inside. When you excavate, you tend to find answers to questions that you have, but you tend also to find new questions. And this is a site where the question marks just pours out of the ground as you excavate. Yes, absolutely. I should say, you do have some answers as well. So I will push you a little bit more on this. These are not normal burials. And you've mentioned that

these were sort of quite violent events. That was quite clear from the bodies, wasn't there? That these were not people who died of just sort of peacefully of disease or anything like that. There's some clear evidence of violence, wasn't there? Well, I mean, this is also one of these excavations where you do actually need a whole team of specialists. So I should say that the whole excavation project from the start has been headed by Dr. Helena Victor at the Kalma County Museum then. And then we had osteologists working with us early on. And from 2014, we have had cloisterologists.

Laura Alv Stotter, who is an osteologist and field archaeologists and also specialist on her body's decay in the ground. Clara's work has been really important in terms of what we can say from the event and what actually happened. So she has been looking at trauma on the skeletons. The conditions of preservation, I mean, Erland is a limestone island, so the soil is very calcareous. So bone generally is well preserved. But in this context, they are not buried, so they have been exposed to different kind of stress from natural forces, so they tend to be not so well preserved in that sense. It's not always possible to identify things like trauma, but I think at least eight individuals

or so that she had been able to actually see trauma on the skeleton. It's mostly sharp force trauma that is like from axes or swords, but we also have some cases of crush wounds like blunt force trauma and also pointing wounds. One thing that I think is interesting is The trauma that she identifies is very concentrated to the head and the upper part of the body. So mainly it's like cuts in the head with axes and swords and one decapitation. I think there's one point wound in the knee and sword cuts in the back of some individual, but otherwise just mainly in the head and upper part of body and inflicted from above or behind in many cases. So it doesn't look like a battle in that sense.

It's more like executions. And also the individuals that she has studied and found trauma, tend to be only one or maybe two wounds that she can see. Anyway, you don't have this 48 stabbing wounds like a passionate virus. You don't get that. It's more like instrumental killing, execution. We often use this term massacre. And I think it's actually relevant in this sense,

because for one thing, the distribution of trauma suggests that this is not a battlefield. It's more like executions. And also if you look at the age distribution, we have from small babies up to people in their 60s. So the youngest individual is only a thigh bone, but it's from a baby that was between one and a half and three months of age when it died. About one third of the aged people are what we would refer to as children. There's an absolutely tragic, completely devastating event then. And presumably there were no weapons and anything like that. It's a domestic setting, isn't it?

In one way, yes, but in another sense, it's a ring forge. The general idea in archaeology in the 20th century is that these sites are built for defensive purposes, and the people on Erland had a lot of contact with the Roman Empire, and they spent time going down to Romans to fight as professional warriors. So you would expect that these kind of sites probably were well defended, and the people who were there could defend themselves, but that's not how it looks when we excavate here. And actually, some researchers have pointed out that weapons are actually a rather unusual find in these places.

You don't find much weapons at the reinforce. You do find exclusive artifacts of different sorts. So this kind of fine jewelry is from really high status, high quality, silver and gold objects. That's what you find. But not so much weapons. And then again, we can't really know what have disappeared. I mean, if you imagine some sort of event where this massacre took place, it could well be that the perpetrators brought some stuff from the site. Even though we get the impression when we excavate that there's a lot of stuff just left there.

We can't really know how much they actually took with them. So for one thing, I strongly suspect that there were swords and access at the site, but maybe they took them with them. And one thing that is like a common occurrence in Scandinavia at this time is that you throw, weapons and other stuff in holy lakes for offerings. And we have one of these sites on the island. We call it sacrificial bog or sacrificial fend, but it was actually a lake, where the oculological excavations have produced huge amount of finds from sacrificed weapons, but also gold artifacts and animals and also people.

So that's an idea that maybe they took the weapons and sacrificed that somewhere, but we don't know. Sex. It might surprise you to know that, oh, it's been around for a while now. In fact, we are all the living, walking, breathing, talking proof that sex has been around for a long time. And over on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast with me, Kate Lister, I will be rooting around for the kinkiest, quirkiest stories in the history of sex, scandal and society. Or in other words, the best bits. Well, at least I think so. From bras to BDSM, from African warrior queens to witches, join me as I bed hop throughout time and civilizations to get under the cover with the most fascinating things that we've been doing,

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so there was a real shortage. If you want to hear about all of this and more, then join me betwixt the sheets today, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you by History Hit. And there's one I've been reading about one of the skeletons in one of the houses of, I think, a slightly older man who was sat by a half

and actually sort of slightly fallen over. Can you tell us a little bit about him? That's right. That's a very personal one. for me because for many years I've been doing some teaching at the university here. And one of the courses I have been doing for more than 10 years is the field schools that we have for archaeology students. And in 2014 I had for the first time archaeology students doing their field course

at San Viborri. Quite impressive, yeah. Yeah, this was in September 2014. And just a couple of months before in June, we have been doing a small excavation at the site and yeah, I found some more human remains, of course. and also a large metal detecting survey and so on. So we had one of the houses at Somiboy. We were not sure from the geophysics.

It was not possible to see is it one house or two houses. So I had an idea. Maybe I can do that with the students. I could take a trench just to check if there's a wall separating these two houses or not. If I'm lucky, we will not find any bodies there. So maybe just a wall or no wall. So I had this excavation for two or three weeks, I think it was, 35 square meters of whatever it was. It was actually the largest trench so far excavated because most of the

early excavation was tiny, two, three days. So now we were there for a couple of weeks and we took this trench and we didn't find a wall so we could see that it's only one house, but sure enough, right in the middle of the trench, a large hearth was excavated and across that fireplace, we found a body of a grown man lying face down in the fireplace. This was actually the first excavation where osteologists, Dr. Clara Alstotter, joined us. So she were there and documented this body on site. As you can see that it's a man probably in his 50s or 60s or old in that sense. One of the features of this skeleton that was immediately got to you is the fact that the pelvis area of the skeleton was clearly affected by fire. So we can see that the fireplace has been

burning and this body has been falling right across the fireplace and has been lying there burning for several hours so that the fire actually affected the bone. And he has not been moving at all. So he must have been deeply unconscious or dead when he fell there. And nobody has moved him and he just lies there. So even though 1500 years has passed, this is one of the cases where you can almost to the exact spot tell where this guy has been standing, which direction he must have been looking. and probably we got a heavy blow to his head, which make him fall down in the fireplace,

and just there we found him 15 years later. That's one of these snapshots that almost gets you chill. And then another feature of this skeleton is concerning the head, because much of the head is missing, and it's not because he's been decapitated. It's probably because the blow might have hit the head. So we found the lower jaw and parts of the cranium, but not more. when we excavate the jaw, we found that not only the man's teeth, but also for sheep teeth. And we first thought it was just a coincidence, but we realized that most likely these sheep teeth,

they are actually placed in the mouth of this individual, which is just really, really strange. And we struggled a bit to understand what the heck is going on here. And we still don't know, of course. Theoretically, it could be a coincidence, but I don't think so. I think it's actually true that they have been placed there. And the most reasonable explanation, I think, is that it's part of de-humiliation. Maybe you can't even exclude like magical aspects to it, placing these teeth in his mouth in combination with the fact that he's actually burning and he's not cremated.

Because in this period in Scandinavia, the normal way to be buried, if you like, is to be cremated. And one of the strange aspects of Sami Bore is that these people were all denied the proper way to die. They were never cremated and they were never buried. So they are sort of left in limbo. They all had this bad death. And this particular case where he's lying in a fireplace burning and got these sheep or goat teeth stuck in his mouth, that's sort of the worst death you can imagine. It's an absolutely exceptional.

and we never get this to just have that snapshots and that treatment of him, whatever that means. I mean, presumably he may well have been somebody important as well to be treated like that in the society, is that thinking? Exactly. I mean, this was in 2014 and we excavated just the central part of this house. So we didn't get the full picture. We knew from before that in the same house, one of the jewelry deposits had been found. So we knew that it was some sort of importance probably. but in 2017 we excavated the rest of the building and got the full picture. And then we could see first of all that it seems that this guy was the only one to be killed in that house. We didn't find any more bodies.

We have some more human remains but only like scattered remains from other individuals that are probably deposited somewhere else at the site. And we can also see that I mean from the central part of the house we excavated in 2014, the finds in general world pretty much like an ordinary dwelling house, character like a lot of pottery, animal bones from food waste and stuff like that and this big fireplace. But when we escape it the rest of the building, we can see that just to the north of where this guy was found, a couple of centimeters outside our trench from 2014. There was like a space in the northern part of the building which totally were lacking

these everyday waste kind of finds. Instead, that's where the jewelry deposit was found. And also we had this small gold treasure. one Roman gold coin and two finger rings of gold, and also fragmentary remains of a Roman glass vessel. So in the northern part of the building, there's a space which this special finds almost like a religious, like sacredness to it. And the gable end of that house is also in that part of the house is a rounded gable, which looks really peculiar, almost like a church. So it's a strange kind of building. and also this building is actually the first building you see when you enter the rainforest from what is probably the main gate.

So you enter the site from the west and you see this house the first that you see. And out in the street, outside this rounded gable land where you have this sacred space, we found a lot of pottery shirts from vessels, at least two vessels, of a very special kind. I mean, the pottery at this site in general is very boring. It's household pottery of pretty, pretty. lousy quality actually. So only it's scattered shirts of rough wear. But

these pots that we found outside this house were of a totally different character. Fine, fine pottery. Decorated jars with fantastic patterns on them and they are of a type that are normally interpreted in Scandinavian archaeology as connected

with drinking ceremonies. So they were found outside this building and these drinking ceremonies could well be connected to like when you receive guests in the hall building, for example. So we do now believe that this house was probably partly used for ceremonies of some sorts. Maybe it is actually what we call a hall building. And that makes you think, who is this guy who were murdered in that building? An older guy, despite his age, he is actually seems to have lived quite a good life. It doesn't seem to have been working

very hard, if you like, and also the way he was murdered. You get the feeling that he was treated in an especially cruel manner. So you have to think of the possibility that he's actually one of the important people at the site, if you like. Yeah, I think that sounds very convincing. I do want to ask you as well about some of these new results that have come out now. So I know that very recently, various scientific investigations are going on about looking at the skeletons. and some DNA results were just published quite recently that analyzed some of the skeletons from the site. What exactly came out of that study? We have done several scientific analysis for several different isotopes like carbon and nitrogen and strontium and so on,

but also ancient DNA. And these analysis, they were sampled for like six years ago. So this is work that has been going on quite a long time. But the results are still coming out and working within. these kind of projects and you get the results in officially in emails. You get, oh, this is the results and now we have to publish them and then it takes like two years before you actually have the paper. These new results that you refer to are the first DNA paper to come out with data from Sambiboy is included. But it's not a paper about the genetic history at Sambi Bore.

It's actually a paper of demographic developments in Scandinavia for the last 2,000 years. So Sambi Bore is one of several sites included in this huge study where they have a number of prehistoric and historic samples from individuals in Scandinavia, different sites, comparing that with the genetics of modern Scandinavia today. So it's a huge study studying the demographic developments. In that context, the people at Sambiboy that we got DNA from looks like people from southern Scandinavia. So that's not a big breakthrough in that sense. But anyway, it's interesting.

But we do have some interesting results, even in a Sambi Bore context. First of all, throughout the excavations, all these human maze coming up, for a long time, we had this growing image that all the skeletons that we found, that we were able to identify as to sex, all the victims seemed to be men. That was like a big issue for a time, where are all the women? And in 2016, we had an excavations where one of the skeletal parts that we found, or cranium, parts of a skeleton, was identified as possibly a woman from osteological point of view. And that find has now been confirmed with DNA to be a woman, actually.

So we do have one woman now, and that is confirmed through genetics. And also from osteological traits, you can't determine the sex on children, of course, because they have not gone through puberty. But through DNA, you can determine the biological sex. So we do have now determinations of several children who are actually boys. So even though we have one woman, we still have 13 boys and men. So there is still a huge overrepresentation of the male sex in the distribution of victims. And again, you should always remember that we have only excavated 10%, so we can't really know the representativity of that.

And that's one of the interesting traits, I think, that we can see. And also, of course, among these seven individuals that we have DNA from, it was interesting to see are they related to each other. Do we have like close kinship? And it seems that we don't, not at least in terms of siblings or like father's son and stuff like that. But more needs to be done on this. And another interesting thing was that we have just started to look at bacterial DNA. And actually it turns out that one of the individuals was infected with different. I don't think that case in itself tells us too much other than the possibility of detecting

that kind of things is really interesting. And I think that is a field where people are now working on, see if we can find some more stuff. That brings us back to what you were saying earlier. We don't get these urban settlements, and I know we can't quite call it urban, but the fact that people are living together and diseases and how those, so you actually get an insight into that because this is a snapshot, so we know that these people live there at the same time. We never normally get that. And I think to me it was quite surprising that you didn't have more family relationships. I know there's only a small proportion of a very small number. But even so, you got these sort of houses and you've got people dying that close together. I would have assumed that

you'd had some family relationships. Yeah, but it comes down to what is the occasion? I mean, what kind of setting? When this massacre happened, what was the occasion? Well, people there for just keeping out the daily lives. Was it like a gathering, special people from all around the island or something else. Was this like a trading activity? We don't really know. So I think when you have like nine individuals, but six complete bodies, all of them boys and men, 15 years old, 90 years old, one of the guys is maybe 40, but that's not a family. I mean, what were they doing there? We don't really know this, I think. We often project our own ideas of what this kind of site would have been and we sort of tend to idealize it, I think, and maybe project what we

want it to look like. And then maybe it's totally different. But anyway, again, these seven individuals where we have genetic data on, it might be that there are 200 people killed here. So those seven individuals can't really tell us much if we are looking for were they in their close relationships in the rainforest. Surely there are people in the rainforest that are related to each other, but we haven't managed to find them yet. Yeah, absolutely. Well, that's what's so intriguing. So just to sort of finish up a little bit. So two things I think are really interesting.

And one is this fact that they remain there. They weren't buried. Nobody came back for them. I mean, normally, we never find this sort of thing because people go back for the dead. And when something that big and massive happens, you would expect somebody to come back, even either because it's their loved ones

and they want to bury them, or even just to be able to reuse the houses and reuse the city, you can't just leave dead bodies lying around, even if they were your enemies or whatever. But this hasn't happened here. They've been abandoned and left there for 1,500 years and nobody's come back. What's the sort of thinking, or do you have any good understanding of why that was the case? That's one of the really strange things about this site.

It's difficult to understand why. And first of all, the normal practice in this period was to cremate your dead. And I think, I mean, these kind of events, a massacre like this, might be that they were more common that we know. let's say that they were actually taking care of the dead after this kind of event and burying them. Would we even be able to detect it archeologically? I don't think so. So I think in this case where they didn't actually take care of the dead, that's one of the reasons that we can actually see that this happened.

So that might be a good thing to have in mind when you think of some of waria as a unique event. Maybe it's not. We don't know. But anyway, the fact that they were left and not taking care of that seems to be unique. And even in a global perspective, we have a hard time finding parallels, actually. Because, I mean, there are many cases where people were not properly buried. But even in battlefields and all like that, the perpetrators tend to do something, like put them in a mass grave or just whatever, throw them in the river or something. Here, they just close the door and left.

And that was for a long time part of the strong narrative at Sambiore. This is like the Swedish Pompeii. People just, they close the door and left and everything is just left as it was like 15. hundred years ago. But then we started to find small anomalies. For example, we found like a broach dating to the early 7th century. Shouldn't be there. What's that? And then another brooch, like 100 years later. What? So we have some indication that something is going on. I mean, the bodies are there and they are dated properly to around year 500, 80, something like that. It could be a couple of decades, but anyway, somewhere there. So the houses were left. They were

abandoned and we don't have much evidence of activities for the next hundred years and so. But then in what we refer to as the Vendel period in Scandinavia, late 6th, early 7th century, we have some stray indications of activities there. But we don't know really what kind of activities. We have a couple of broaches. We have some actually a fireplace in one of the houses, which is later than the house itself. And then also outside the ring fort, we have found quite extensive activities might be connected with actually tearing parts of the site down.

So it seems that maybe 100 years after the massacre or so, people have been there doing something, but we don't really know what. And that's also a strange and interesting. But I think if we go back to the fact why were people just left there, I think that's also one of the things we have used to sort out in our heads who did this. First of all, it doesn't look like a robbery in the sense that if there was an economic motive than the valuables. It seems strange that they were just left, but also the site itself, I think.

It would be economically interesting to actually take over the site. Instead, the manner of this was executed in, and also the fact that it was just left points towards some sort of power struggle. And the idea in the project has been that since these people were not buried, that probably means that perpetrators stopped people from doing that. So maybe the perpetrators was still there on the island afterwards, which could mean that it's an internal struggle on the island between competing elite groups, maybe. It's just a hypothesis.

But that's a sort of a general idea now that the massacre at Zambibari could be a result of probably a long conflict escalating into this horrific events where power balance shifted. In that narrative or in that interpretation, the massacre is used as a political tool. So the idea was not to kill these individuals, but to kill them as a way of telling to someone else, this is what happens if you mess with us. So that's sort of a general idea now. But I mean, I'm still of this opinion that we have excavated a portion of this site. And if we excavate more, it could well be that this idea just flips around and turns into something else.

We'll see. And that's the beauty of archaeology, isn't it? It really is. Ludwig, that was absolutely fantastic. Thank you so much for sharing all of that with us today and I can't wait to hear what next is going to come out soon. Thank you so much. It wasn't real pleasure to be here. And this brings us to the end of this episode of Gone Medieval.

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