"We have to understand the complexity of medieval combat; it's not a simple process," Patrick Randolph-Quinney, a biological anthropologist at Uppsala University in Sweden, said in a research presentation Aug. 5 at the 25th European Paleopathology Association meeting in Berlin. The research has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
The men who died at the Battle of Visby were buried in their armor immediately after the fighting concluded. Their final resting place — a mass grave close to the battlefield — was first excavated in the early 20th century. But experts still have questions about what actually happened in the battle and how medieval combat worked.
One of the 700-year-old skulls from a combatant in the Battle of Visby that had mysterious square holes. (Image credit: Patrick Randolph-Quinney)
To better understand the lives and deaths of the men in the mass grave at Visby, Randolph-Quinney launched a project in collaboration with experts in conflict archaeology, ancient DNA, medieval history, and medieval weapons and armor. "It's very difficult to understand what's going on if you actually don't understand what people are capable of doing in those kinds of situations," he said.
The team created a model of a human body using cow bones covered in a thick layer of ballistic gelatine, a special type of gelatine engineered to replicate human muscle tissue, and topped with replica medieval armor. Then, they dressed researcher Ray Whitcher, an expert in medieval reenactment, in a 4D motion capture suit, which records movements from multiple angles over a period of time. They gave Whitcher a range of replica weapons, with the direction to go "full-on berserker mode" on the gelatin-covered bones, Randolph-Quinney said.
Researchers built a replica knout (spiked club) to test whether it could make the square holes seen in the skull. (Image credit: Patrick Randolph-Quinney)Several of the skeletons had multiple traumatic injuries, in addition to damage from the spiked club. By looking closely at the injuries, the researchers were able to figure out which blow came first and which weapon made it. One skull, for example, had evidence of an ax blow that was then interrupted by the impact from a spiked club, suggesting an attack by more than one person.
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"They may not have been in a standing army, but that doesn't mean they didn't have training," Jo Buckberry, a biological anthropologist at the University of Bradford in the U.K. who is collaborating on the project, told Live Science. "We have demonstrated that many of the historical assumptions about weapon type, fighting style, and the delivery of fatal wounds are incorrect," Randolph-Quinney added.
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