That thing about medieval bones being jumbled up in graves...

I was reading about a dig in York from 2022 where they found a mass grave of Viking warriors. Everyone online kept saying it was a battle burial but the excavators found no weapon wounds at all, just signs of a plague. It made me realize how often we jump to conclusions about what we find. The bones showed the same disease pattern across all of them, which is pretty clear evidence. Has anyone else noticed popular stories about artifacts getting twisted before the full report comes out?

2 comments

2 Comments

drew_grant523d ago

Oh yeah, the "everything is a dramatic battle" theory is a classic. People see a pile of bones and immediately picture swords clashing instead of, you know, a bad flu season. It's like when someone finds an old rusty knife and declares it's a Viking ceremonial blade, but really it's just a butter knife from 1850 that got left in a field. The worst is when they don't even wait for the carbon dating, they just go straight to the most cinematic explanation. The plague finding is actually way more interesting though, because it tells you about actual life and death instead of just another fight. But nope, gotta have the Vikings swinging axes instead of coughing.

iris_stone283d ago

Blame the same instinct that makes people assume any noise in the basement is a burglar, not a squeaky pipe.