Victims of a 17th century massacre in Central Europe: perimortem trauma of castle defenders

Abstract

Interments of massacre victims typically differ from normal funerary practices. Bodies are commonly not orderly buried, but are thrown into a single grave‐pit and exhibit multiple perimortem traumatic injuries. Although perimortem skeletal trauma constitutes the most direct and unambiguous evidence for violence and warfare in the past, analysis should take contextual information into account. The aim of our research is to examine the skeletal evidence of interpersonal violence in the remains of defenders of a castle in Gołańcz, Poland, who were killed in AD 1656 during the Polish‐Swedish War. This event is well documented in the historical sources, thereby providing the detailed socio‐cultural context.

Standard anthropological methods were used to estimate age‐at‐death and biological sex. Macroscopic morphological features developed by forensic anthropologists were applied to distinguish between antemortem, perimortem and postmortem trauma. Descriptive and metric attributes were analyzed for each injury.

Of the 25 skeletons recovered from a mass grave, 22 displayed evidence of perimortem trauma. In total, 90 injuries were found, mainly consisting of sharp‐force trauma. These included 79 injuries to the skull, two injuries to the teeth and nine injuries to the postcranial skeleton. Multiple traumatic lesions were found in 15 individuals (68.1%). The most prevalent were sharp‐force trauma (21 individuals, 95.5%), followed by blunt‐force trauma (two individuals, 9.1%.), with high‐velocity projectile wounds being least common (one individual, 4.5%). Two individuals had their teeth broken off in the perimortem period.

Our study revealed that the inhabitants of Gołańcz were subjected to an extreme level of interpersonal violence, as evidenced by the location, pattern, and distribution of the observed traumatic injuries. From archaeological and historical data, it is known that the event took place during the Swedish invasion into Poland. Our data demonstrate that violence was inflicted not only upon men, but also upon women and children. These findings are in contrast to written accounts, which maintain that the Swedish army spared women and children during the attack, and as such show bias inherent to culture‐related sources of information.

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