再Towton 2/2 - Medieval warfare, December 18th 2010 P100 (中世戦士の遺骨)
He gets his name from the order in which he was removed from the ground. In the summer of 1996 builders working at Towton Hall, about a mile away from the main battlefield, discovered a mass grave. Archaeologists from the University of Bradford eventually took charge of an excavation of almost 40 individuals, 28 of whom were complete skeltons. (Further bodies have subsequently been recovered from beneath the dining-room at Towton Hall, which must make for conversation, at least.) The skeletons had clearly been the victims of great violence. Many display the same frenzied wounding as Towton 25. ゛Imagine one of those movie scenes with people closing in on a cornered individual,゛says Christopher Knusel, one of the original team of archaeologists and now at the University of Exeter. ゛Usually the camera has to pan away because you cannot show some things. Here you see it.゛The location of the bodies, and subsequent carbon-dating, linked them conclusive ly to the battle of Towton. It is the only mass grave of known medieval battle victims to have been found in England. The only comparable find is that of a mass grave of victims of the Battle of Wisby in Sweden in 1361, which was excavated in the early 20th century. That find was considerably large - 1,185 individuals from four separate pits - and notable, too, for the fact that the dead had been buried in their armour. The Towton men had been stripped before being thrown into the pit. The only personal effect found in the grave was a silver ring still encircling the little finger of Towton 39；it may have been missed because of the sheer quantity of gore. But Towton has proved more instructive in some ways. The size of the Wisby find and the way in which the bodies there were removed, with the graves broken into grids and excavated one square at a time, made it almost impossible to reassemble skeletons later. At Towton, under the guidance of Tim Sutherland, an archaeologist who has been researching the battlefield ever since, skeltons were carefully recorded in the grave so that they could be put back together again. As described in ゛Blood Red Roses゛, a book on the archaeology of Towton, this has allowed a more complete picture of participants in the fighting to emerge. The men whose skeletons were unearthed at Towton were a diverse lot. Their ages at time of death ranged widely. It is easier to be precise about younger individual, thanks to the predictable ways in which teeth develop and bones fuse during a person's adolescence and 20s. The youngest occupants of the mass grave were around 17 years old；the oldest, Towton 16, was around 50. Their stature varies greatly, too. The men's height ranges from 1.5-1.8 metres (just under five feet to just under six feet), with the older men, almost certainly experienced soldiers, being the tallest. This physical diversity is unsurprising, given the disparate types of men who took the battlefield that day. Yet as a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall - just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. ゛It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted,゛says Mr Knusel. Their health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their kneebones show that they ate pretty healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong too.
