Broken medieval skeleton first confirmed death by trebuchet

Science reports on a 14th-century skeleton found in a Scottish castle that looked like it had been hit by a bus … but, archaeologists determined, the poor fellow had been crushed by a flying boulder hurled by a massive siege engine:

Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

In a presentation at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin last week, University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry called the skeleton the first confirmed evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record. “The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

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Skeleton 150 came to light in 1997, when excavations underneath Stirling Castle’s chapel uncovered the graves of nine skeletons dated to the early 1300s. Five, including Skeleton 150, dated to the 1300s. Their bones bore injuries and cut marks indicative of violent lives—and violent deaths.

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Skeleton 150 stood out. Buckberry counted more than 160 separate fractures on the 165-centimeter-tall remains, including a skull smashed in 61 places, a deep, zigzag break to a shoulder, and nearly 60 strange, zigzagging breaks to the ribs. “It’s very clear the energy is going through the chest,” says Uppsala University biological anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who worked with Buckberry on the skeletal analysis. “The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards.”

The extensive injuries to the rest of the body—particularly the strange breaks on the rib cage and a shattered right leg—ruled out the most obvious possibility, a head-first fall from the castle’s walls. The shape and texture of the breaks eliminated trampling by horses and damage to the skeleton after burial.

To solve the mystery, Buckberry scoured the forensic and medical literature and searched through anatomical collections for equivalent injuries. “It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains,” Buckberry says. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304 [C.E.]?”

Buckberry found the likeliest answer in history books. During Edward I’s 1304 siege of the castle, English forces deployed the recently invented trebuchet, a weapon first documented in the 12th century. A cousin to the catapult, trebuchets were capable of hurling boulders weighing more than 100 kilograms hundreds of meters. One at Stirling, dubbed “War Wolf,” “was the biggest trebuchet ever built at that point,” Buckberry says. Eyewitness accounts confirm the giant siege engine was used during the 1304 battle, tearing through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”

Skull photos at the link.