This Human Skeleton Found Beneath The Battle Of Waterloo Could Rewrite History

Last week, a Waterloo archaeological team discovered an extraordinary find on the Waterloo

battle

field. It's a find that

could

rewrite

the

history

books. I am very pleased to say that the story reaches James Rogers himself who was there when the story emerged from the earth. At dusk on June 18, 1815, the cannons on the fields of Waterloo fell silent. Napoleon had suffered his final defeat at the hands of Wellington Blucher and his allied armies. The curtain fell on the Napoleonic era and

history

was made, but more than 200 years later, A dedicated team of world-class archaeologists, students and veterans from the charity Waterloo Uncovered, are determined not only to read about the history but also to unearth it, and I too have been invited since 2015.

Waterloo Uncovered has been coming to the Waterloo

battle

field and has made some surprising discoveries that not only supported the accepted story of the battle but also changed it, but

this

year 2022 they made a discovery that no one

could

have expected, a discovery that will place Waterloo discovered in the history books themselves. I've been doing archeology for 25 years and I've never seen anything like

this

, possibly you know, one of the best finds we've ever had because you just don't find bones in Waterloo. The Battle of Waterloo took place here, about 10 miles south of Brussels, just south of the town of Waterloo, in fact Napoleon never called it Waterloo, but instead called it the Battle of Monsenjon, the name of a farm just next door. north of the battlefield and Blucher, well, he called it Bel Alliance after the name of an inn that and Wellington met after hostilities ended the battlefield itself was small, only a few kilometers wide but despite This was a complicated affair.

Some 200,000 French, British, Prussian and Dutch soldiers from all over Europe were crammed into this undulating landscape. The air was thick with smoke from the guns. Communication between positions was a nightmare. Waterloo descended into battles within. battles like the famous fight at Hugemon or the Hey Sant, as Wellington said Waterloo was like a ball, everyone would come out of it with their own very different experience, hundreds of traditional stories. The battle has been written about, but surprisingly little modern archeology has been carried out, so in 2015 a team from Waterloo discovered the battlefield and decided to put their boots on the ground and start exploring the battlefield for For the next four years, they excavated throughout the battlefield making exciting discoveries. like an intact French howitzer and several British uniform buttons that helped retell the story of Hugemon's defense now in 2022 and having lost two years due to the covid pandemic, the team was eager to get back to digging, the ground was broken. on July 4, 2022 with several sites reserved for field work, the two most interesting are the Monsenjon farm, where it is hoped that the team will be able to continue the work they started in 2019, and the metal detectorists obtained permission to work on Wellington's famous reverse slope. the site of some of the cruelest fighting during the battle i'm going to start at monson john the site the

waterloo

discovered team began excavating in 2019 to discover more about the importance of the site i spoke to one of the

found

ers of

waterloo

discovered charlie Fauinette, so here we are at Monsanto.

Monsanto is a farm that sits behind the ridge that was the Allied line during the Battle of Waterloo and this place is interesting because it was the field hospital during the battle and it has a perfect view because it is just far enough back that it is not directly involved in most of the fighting, but it is close enough to be a covered place where you can concentrate casualties easily and quickly, and what happened here during the battle was quite gruesome, a large number of amputations, hundreds of people. of amputations and as we know surgery was a fairly rudimentary business in 1815, what we have here is the Monsanto orchard, which is a really interesting archaeological context because it has never been plowed, it has always been pasture or orchard, which means that the archeology is at a relatively shallow level undisturbed and the last time we were here in 2019 we did a lot of inspection, metal detecting started opening up trenches to see what the metal detecting sources were giving us and at this particular location We come across a set of metal objects. which we think is some kind of ammunition container, ammunition box, I'm not sure what, but interestingly enough, when we started digging it up, what we

found

was a set of

human

legs, amputated legs, I think three of them turned up in 2019 and really, really clearly, you had amputation cut marks.

At the top of the femur there was obvious bone damage and in one case a musket ball still within the bone assembly. The lead archaeologist on site is Professor Tony Pollard. It wasn't just the

human

bone that we found a few meters away that way. We found animal bones sticking out of the side of the trench section and they were teeth, huge teeth, we thought it was a horse or a cow but the problem was we were running out of time so we had bone specialists. They were lifted and taken to the laboratory in Brussels and tested and we covered the rest of the trench and we thought we would return in 2020.

Little did we know that it would be affected by the pandemic, so 2020 moves to 2021. and now we are in 2022, so this is the first time we have returned since then, a few hours after that three year break, being on the monsanjon trench is revealing some of its secrets and not only the teeth of a horse are beginning to appear, but a complete

skeleton

that we built up just below the surface what we thought at the time just looked like teeth and then as the days went on, as you can see now, we are developing what we think is a complete horse

skeleton

, so these are teeth and this is the jaw and we get to the four limbs here and of course this is the ribcage following the spine and we hope that where Jim is he finds the hind legs we think there are three horses so there are some horse remains . bone in this right hand, part of our trench, there are some horse bones there and now we have found some horse bones in a trench there, it is still not known exactly why these horse remains are found next to a hospital for human victims.

Sure, all the team can do now is continue clearing the remains for more analysis later in the week, but before that question can be answered, even more bones begin to reveal themselves, so we started here three days ago and this was the only thing exposed. What I thought it potentially was, I knew was bone, but I'm not sure I know, maybe some kind of part of a leg or something. I started digging and then we found what we thought was a kneecap. Initially we thought it was something like that. from where they, you know, had an amputation or something, but then with the knee and then I found this bone that was going here, and then we kept digging and the more it comes out the more, it's kind of what they call a joint, um. and they, um, so we thought that potentially there could be a complete skeleton, um, so from that little bit you know, you managed to know, so yeah, I'm very excited, I want to continue working after further cleaning.

What we thought might be human remains are actually more remains of a horse. The trench at Monson John is raising more questions than it answers at the moment and so, to better understand the site, the decision was made at the end of the third day to extend the veronique muller, a belgian archaeologist who works for the balloon heritage agency, oversaw the expansion of the trench and was on site when a truly surprising discovery was made after spending a harrowing night with the team. They arrive at the site to begin the careful excavation around the place where the teeth were found.

What they find surprises everyone: a human skull. The question now is the rest of the skeleton intact. Here in the Monson John trench there is a hive of activity so they There are so many things being found here that covers every aspect of the battle, if you look at the other end you have three horse skeletons, giant skeletons being found and unearthed and then in the middle you have these cartridges, ammunition bags that would have been in the soldiers, but this is something that is going to make history it is the third human skull found at the site of the battle of Waterloo human remains are not only rare in Waterloo, they are almost unheard of only one complete skeleton has been found in the field of battle a discovery made in 2012, but the conservative figure puts the dead on both sides at 15,000.

Well, where did all the bones go? Tony suggests what might have happened to the men who fell that day. The treatment of the dead was very superficial. We have very different ideas and different attitudes towards the pain of death and everything that comes with it, including the elimination of debt, and we have military cemeteries, we have this idea of ​​sacred ground, none of that existed in the early 19th century, they buried them . They put people in pits in large numbers, but also in twos and threes, and a couple of visitors described the fields and the hills and the rolling landscape as if it were covered with molehills, all of them being graves of the dead, but they are not only In the pits they are actually burning the dead and some of the bodies would have reached the cemeteries of the local churches, but in general you know that 15,000 dead are buried in pits on the battlefield or burned on the battlefield.

No records of graves have been found in the modern era and we have been working here since 2015. We have done a lot of work around Hugemon. We have observed geophysical anomalies. We have not found a single grave, not even in areas where we have period paintings and period descriptions of burial pits, there has been nothing and I have just published an article that, to my great surprise, has aroused quite a bit of interest and I suggested There are stories that have been passed around that these pits were basically dug up in the decades after the battle and the bones were collected and sent to the UK and ground into bone meal and powder and used as fertilizer, and we have got articles in newspapers from the 1820s and 1830s about what happened, but very little additional evidence, so my working hypothesis, if you like, when we got here this week was that we're not likely to find many of these graves because My feeling is that many of them have been looted, but I needed more evidence that in the trenches, the careful work of excavating the notable remains is revealing more of the skeleton.

Now Caroline Lafourette, an anthropologist at the Royal Belgian Institute of Natural Sciences in Brussels, has also joined the team and Caroline's experience will help decode this new discovery. I have walked away from the excitement at Mons and John to reach the center of the Waterloo battlefield, to the famous reverse slope, and this is sacred ground for Waterloo. team discovered for one of the first times in history have been given permission to take out their metal detectors and scan the area, they are finding musket balls and pieces of shells that show where soldiers fought and fell and it's strange to think but whoever That he's in that well at Monson John, well, he may have fallen right here.

The reverse slope saw some fierce fighting and was also the gathering place of the British heavy cavalry ahead of their famous charge. David Olk, an archaeologist and metal detectorist, has been with the discovered Waterloo team from the beginning and hopes this new survey will reveal more details about that crucial clash. Wellington had brought several of his reserves to this area and had asked them to basically lie down so they couldn't. be seen by the opposition um so when it came time for them to do their part they clearly would have been shot at um and as I say we are looking to recover um anything from that contact predominantly musket balls and cannon balls and the fines from the fields are Arriving, in addition to the coins and buttons, hundreds of musket balls, both French and Allied, are being found as testimony to the terrible fighting that would have taken place here in Mons and John, even more horse remains are being handed over.

As the hour passes, new theories about the trench are discovered, but a gruesome new discovery leads Tony to a particularly tragic conclusion if we imagine that, say no, the famous afternoon French cavalry charge around 4 p.m. late and involving perhaps between eight and ten thousand horses, imagine how many of them are killed or wounded, and since it was easier to shoot a horse and wound it than the man riding it, especially if it had armor, for what many thousands of horses aredying. and thousands are injured and there are stories of horses with mangled snouts limping on three legs, you know, an absolute horror show and obviously many of these had to be destroyed, cut down, it's the only thing that can do what they've done here .

I think they cut this hole, there's probably a ramp at one end, they led them one by one and they shot them and they just fell down and we actually have people on the team that you already know. Cavalry still exists in some form within our veteran community and I asked Sam to tell me that this is exactly like a horse ladder, a horse's body crumples up when it is shot, it just falls straight down and that is captured here, that moment is captured in skeletal form. and then we brought Gary in with the metal detector and said scan the trench.

Each skull had the signature of what we think is a musket ball, so they brought them in one after another, nose to tail, shot them in the head. That's what we're working on, but that story could change, yet we are cleaning them out, so right now we have four horses lined up in a pit specifically cut for disposal and the disposal of human bodies of which I have at least one. It looks like a complete skeleton. As the team discovered at Waterloo races toward the middle of their excavation window. The clock is ticking to discover the human remains as quickly but as delicately as possible.

It's hard work with new team members stepping in. to help scrape millimeters of dirt at a time as more and more skeletal remains are discovered, but despite the excitement, the skeleton raises more questions than it answers, this is the truly remarkable find here in Waterloo discovered, we don't know altogether. We know how old this person is, we don't know what gender he is for sure, but this was Monson John, this was the site of the battlefield hospital at Waterloo, so most likely this is a male body that we know about a couple things. If you look here you can see that the molars are fully developed which means the person is at least over 15 years old but you won't know the true age until he gets to the pelvis, if there is a pelvis he looks up . here and you can see a leg bone that just broke, so you have one leg up by the head and then you have your arms turning to the sides.

This is really a horrible injury or it's a lot. of different body parts and bodies thrown into a pit after the true horror of what happened at the Battle of Waterloo and the injuries at Monson John, but no matter who it is, the surprising thing is that this is only the second body. Once found at the Battle of Waterloo, only once the body is fully excavated will we have a chance to answer some of the questions raised, but based on the other human finds in this trench, this person may have died in the operating table and then simply ejected.

In this ditch, I met with co-founder Charlie one last time, who summarized the position that Waterloo discovered. Now they meet. There is a lot to do here and the real work will begin once these skeletons are lifted and then we can get closer. after the digging because that's the really clever thing, that's where all the witchcraft happens that allows you to see where they come from, the pathology, the health, etc., this is really exciting. Waterloo is remembered by many for its gigantic cavalry charges, acts of daring. and the courage and the fact that it was a great victory for Britain and its allies, but I think what this remarkable find really does is bring home the brutal reality of the fighting that took place on that terrible day, the terrible cost of victory, this work continues. and you can be sure that History Hit will be there every step of the way as this story continues to unfold.

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