“We estimate that there are at least 75 dead, who were buried very close together in several layers,” archaeologist Susanne Friederich said on Friday.
The Battle of Lützen, which took place in 1632, pitted Swedish soldiers against those under the command of German Roman Catholic general Albrecht von Wallenstein.
It was one of the bloodiest battles of the Thirty Years’ War, with an estimated 6,500 to 10,000 casualties. The Swedish King Gustavus Adolphus was also mortally wounded during the battle.
Also related, National Geographic has a new series called Warrior Graveyard that’s actually worth checking out. They take a different set of human remains every week and examine them forensically showing what probably happened to each of a number of individuals. So far they’ve all been from incidents I knew nothing about. They go a little crazy with the reconstructions, but they’re not as bad as a lot of them, and they’re usually done to show how particular wounds on the skeletons were probably administered. Good reminder of how brutal conflict really used to be (and still is, but past violence is often sanitized).