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Archaeologist might have solved 1,500-year-old mystery crime


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The first clue that a dark story was lurking at an Iron Age site at Sandby Borg, Sweden, came in 2010. Archaeologists discovered jewelry and other valuable items. The mystery deepened a year later when the team from the Kalmar County Museum returned to this fortified village on the island of Öland and found human remains.

Over the next few years, 26 bodies were unearthed at Sandby Borg, a windswept site alongside a beach. The positioning of the corpses and forensic evidence all pointed to a chilling conclusion: One day in the late fifth century, an act of mass murder occurred at Sandby Borg. A the team of archaeologists is attempting to reconstruct what happened here more than 1,500 years ago.

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The pits were filled with rings, silver brooches, bells, and coins. Some of these goods, including a coin, are of Roman provenance.  The Öland elite must have traded extensively with Rome. These factors caused luxury goods and Roman coins to accumulate across the island.

The intact treasure stashes remain a puzzle to scholars. One hypothesis is that the massacre was so brutal that everyone, women included, was either dead or too scared to return. Scholars also wondered why the murderers did not loot the wealthy village and why later treasure hunters left the site untouched for so many centuries after the destruction.

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Clara Alfsdotter of Linnaeus University, Kalmar, Sweden, has examined all the evidence gathered at Sandby Borg. “The perpetrators do not appear to have been very interested in staying and searching for loot,” Alfsdotter observes in the European Journal of Archaeology.

She suggests their motivation was likely revenge, “based on a feeling of past injustices and a perception of the Sandby Borg group as a threat.” Ultimately, the motive behind the massacre “was probably to attain regional power and control.”

Source - https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/history-magazine/article/can-archaeologists-solve-swedens-1500-year-old-murder-mystery

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  • FfFfFfFF changed the title to Archaeologist might have solved 1,500-year-old mystery crime

made me think of the scene in GOT when all the village people minding their business get killed by idk scary bad guys lol on horses 

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4 hours ago, weed said:

made me think of the scene in GOT when all the village people minding their business get killed by idk scary bad guys lol on horses 

It may not a direct inspiration, but the mainstream TV is full of Scandinavian/ Viking and Celtic references. We all know the ''Scandinavian/ Viking'' imagery because these populations played a major role in British and American history, but realistically non-Americans are much closer to other populations we often don't know much about because they are less talked about and less promoted on movies, TV etc.

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