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Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?
- highcountess 2y ago[flagged]
- WanderPanda 2y ago[flagged]
- alsetmusic 2y agoYes. Edit: whoops, commented while out to drinks. I screwed up.
- boomboomsubban 2y agoNo, the article discusses how it seems very probable there was mass grave robbing for sugar production. So the answer is "yes" or at least "probably."
- defrost 2y agoIt's a definite "Yes" as far as UK archaeologists and historians have agreed for some time now. In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond. New book, old knowledge. IIRC contemporary documentation, from the 19th Century, related to exploiting bone fields has been shown on UK TV as part of Digging For Britain and other such shows in years past.
- boomboomsubban 2y ago>an international team of historians and archaeologists argues... They seem to agree it's "probably." Proof is hard.
- defrost 2y agoIn the book they argue .. there's a case to be made and arguing "both sides" and mystery is what books do. Elsewhere: Traffic in Human Bones— A ship from Hamburg arrived at Lossiemouth last week, laden with bones, the property of an agriculturalist of Morayshire, and intended for manure. The master of the vessel states that the bones were collected from the plains and marches of Leipsic (sic), and are part of the remains of the thousands who fell in the battles fought betwixt France and the Allies in October 1813 ~ The Spectator (London, 7 November 1829) https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/7th-november-1829/5/clinere--the-quantity-of-cider-produced-in-the-cou https://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/7th-november-1829/5/... The bones being taken for use as fertilizer, for sugar from beet, the teeth "Waterloo Teeth" for false teeth for the living, etc were things that happened and were reported at the time . . . There are academic papers on war fields where this is known to have happened and others where it is conjected to have occurred .. but proof of actual occurrence exists.
- pinkmuffinere 2y agoFor anyone confused how grave robbing would contribute to sugar production: "In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond."
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 2y agoTo this day, most white sugar is made with animal bone char and therefore not vegan. Brown sugar is sometimes but not always vegan.
- worthless-trash 2y agoIs this case in most of the world ? I've done a walk through of a few different sugar cane based sugar mills and seen the use of some coal based carbon ( calcium carbonate , if memory serves correctly) and this was back as early as 1990). Brown sugar is white sugar with molasses, or at least it is in Australia. If your white sugar isn't vegan, your brown sugar is not either.
- bdjsiqoocwk 2y agoDo you not get tired of the same comment over and over again?
- newprint 2y agoDamn, this is dark.
- pizzafeelsright 2y agoIf there's ever a plane crash I'm looking for cash and watches.
- onlypassingthru 2y agoDon't forget to grab a garbage bag full of weed on your way out.[0] [0]https://www.climbing.com/people/yosemite-dope-airplane-crash/ https://www.climbing.com/people/yosemite-dope-airplane-crash...
- devilbunny 2y agoI don't have a link, but a similar story happened on top of a mesa near Moab, Utah, in the 1970s. Local climbers already knew routes to the top and hiked out with whatever they could carry before the feds could fully clear it.
- dhosek 2y agoJust hope the bears don’t get to the cocaine first.
- ulnarkressty 2y agoYou wouldn't be the first to think of this https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/flight-mh17-crash-site-has-been-heavily-looted/374707/ https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/fl...
- ohwaitnvm 2y agoI couldn’t find the right combination of search terms to provide a citation, but I’ve heard stories of plane crashes where locals took the flight data recorder or other critical pieces of evidence from the scene before officials arrived. Rewards had to be announced and paid out to get people to bring back parts so that investigations could proceed.
- flir 2y agoI'm reminded of the scene in Lord of War when an arms shipment lands on a dirt road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kipeOTbUqvk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kipeOTbUqvk
- digestivetires 2y ago1800 is somewhat recent history (compared to year 1799 or -1). It is interesting that stuff like this gets forgotten in such short time frame and requires investigation/ discovery. It’s interesting to wonder, what common facts of today, will become mysteries for future historians.
- mncharity 2y agoCould history education usefully emphasize a theme of time-traveler surprise? - "You've traveled back in time, and find... wtf that's weird!"
- ggm 2y ago... in the modern era. It's a given that fabric and metals are high cost of production from raw inputs, and pre-mechanisation would be far too valuable to just leave in the fields. Post mechanisation the problem is logistics. (The factory war era pretty much begins with the Napoleonic war: Marc Brunel (Isembards father) made boot making machines and block making machines for the british war supply chain. You can see the blockworks in Portsmouth harbour and bits of the machines are in the science museum, London) I think "battlefield pick-over" is not a busted trope. Logistics means you use the stuff to hand, be it 155mm shells you captured taking a Russian trench system, or arrows left over from a stupid french knight charge over muddy ground towards english archers. The point here, is that a vaguely disgusting re-use of the consequences of war, is that dead bodies turn out to be valuable, not just the grave goods around them. You want phosphates for fertilizer enough that digging up bones to burn to make it, is worthwhile. You would think that the slaughter of cattle and sheep provided enough but a few thousand buried soldiers is a pretty good deposit. In times past soldiers piss has been used to make gunpowder, dung was used in leathermaking. What's the difference here to using urine, and digging up dead mans bones?
- NegativeLatency 2y agoWhat’s a block making machine? Or a block for that matter?
- buildsjets 2y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Block_Mills https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Block_Mills
- Ekaros 2y agoI remember hearing that there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases... Humans never have valued far enough removed dead... And surely yes, if I were local peasant near battlefield I would go and pick through it after everyone is gone. Or at latest when most of the stink is gone... Metals at least had value.
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- gyudin 2y agoMedieval recycling was dark lol
- seanhunter 2y agoAnyone who's played enough dwarf fortress knows that goblinite[1] is one of the most important sources of metals. [1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Goblinite https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Goblinite
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- Borrible 2y agoAnd then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer. https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-anniversary-battle-waterloo---9476778 https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier
- gdcbe 2y agoIn Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.
- CarRamrod 2y agoThe secret of Belgian chocolate, revealed
- AndyMcConachie 2y agoThose are African bodies.
- 082349872349872 2y ago> we (not me) of course not you flemish, it must've been those perfidous walloons, hoor
- dmurray 2y agoYes indeed. Science.org recently published an interesting interview [0] on exactly that, that even made the HN front page. [0] https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-dead-went-did-grave-robbers-plunder-battlefields https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-de...
- Borrible 2y agoThe deeper you plough this field, the more fruitful the findings. No dead end in sight. This may even take the cake. Dark and heavy Belgian cake. Cake of the dead, so to speak.
- ergonaught 2y agoSoylent Green is people, indeed.
- btbuildem 2y agoAh, the OG human resources. Into the bone crusher!
- metachris 2y agoI mean, there were plenty of poor people, and there's free stuff, so...
- dhosek 2y agoIf I might make a modest proposal…
- digging 2y agoThis is very cool actually! Human bodies take so many resources from the Earth to grow, the very least we can do is recycle what's left when we die. Body composting ("green burial") is an increasingly popular option today, but I wouldn't mind if my bones were used in manufacturing either. (Actually my biggest objection would be who's profiting off my bones. I've spent almost my whole life so far enriching billionaires, and it would be cool if that could end at my death.) I think what's most surprising to me is that I didn't realize battlefield mass graves were actually so common in the past. At this scale it makes sense, but I had an idea from antiquity studies that war dead were expected to be brought home for burial. (That could also be untrue of antiquity tbh; burial was always an incidental topic.)
- carlosjobim 2y agoMaybe part of the explanation is that there weren't as many soldiers in these battles as historical accounts say. We're well aware that official Roman numbers of the sizes of armies were hugely bloated compared to reality. The same might well be true of later battles.
- Borrible 2y agoI just remembered that the first time I read about this, I rummaged around for source material. There is a book from 1840 in which the processing of human bones from battlefields is described as productive and profitable. Carl T. von Natorp, "Ueber den Gebrauch und Werth der Knochendüngung", 1840 "On the use and value of bone fertilization" There is a bad scan by google books of parts of the text written in German Fraktur, but on page 410 he's clearly talking about the English that started to collect bones from the battlefields to use as fertilizer in 1822. https://books.google.de/books?id=PyRAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=PA410&dq=knochen+schlachtfelder+d%C3%BCnger&source=bl&ots=P3QU1P-wGn&sig=ACfU3U36u1rl6iQd5AFf21hLI8xHjNGHjg&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiw0PH6wKjgAhXJZVAKHWTgDAgQ6AEwCnoECAIQAQ#v=onepage&q=knochen%20schlachtfelder%20d%C3%BCnger&f=false https://books.google.de/books?id=PyRAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=P...