Another article on wound trauma

[Erpingham]

This recent article looks at more wound trauma evidence, this time from the Early Middle Ages.  A caveat is I personally found the layout a little tricky to read but the content is OK, being a survey of several cemeteries of the Carolingian/Ottonian period.

most wounds looked at were on skulls , with a few others.  This is a bit surprising, as arm and leg wounds are not uncommon elsewhere.  I suspect a sampling artefact here.

One point that occured to me as I read, and is picked up toward the end, is that these bodies must have been transported to these churches from unidentified battlefields to be formally buried.  They are not in massed pits, suggesting this is not a local clear up operation.  Several are in prestigious places, perhaps indicating that the dead man was locally significant.  It's a great contrast to the idea of corpses left to rot on the field.  Were these from the winning side or had the victor granted the losers the right to retrieve at least their higher-ranking dead?  I don't think we can know.

[aligern]

Or are they the victims of judicial or semi judicial killings? We havevthe example of Clovis and the ewer, were executions in this period a matter of skull splitting?
Roy

[Erpingham]

Or are they the victims of judicial or semi judicial killings? We havevthe example of Clovis and the ewer, were executions in this period a matter of skull splitting?
Roy

Even if this were so, the presence of healed sharp trauma on some skeletons would need a different explanation.