1500-Year-Old Mystery Of The Sandby Borg – Excavation Of Ringfort On Öland, Sweden
During the excavation of Sandby Borg Ringfort on the island of Öland, Sweden, several macabre finds were made.
Skeletal remains from a small child were found in one of the houses in the Ringforts central block. This is the first child to be identified among the victims of the massacre at Sandby Borg.
‘It is both frightening and sensational in the sense that before this find the results showed that there had only been adults in the ringfort when this horrific event took place,’ says Helena Victor, project manager at the Dept. of Museum Archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, Sweden.
It sheds a whole new light on the massacre, she continues.
The excavation was carried out in September by the Department of Museum Archaeology at Kalmar County Museum, in cooperation with students from Linnaeus University.
Osteological analyses have now been made of the bones that were uncovered and experts confirm that they belong to two individuals, one of which is a child of an estimated age of 2 to 5 years.
In the same house, the skeleton of a middle-aged, 50 to 60-year-old man was found lying on his stomach in the central of the building.
What we can see by looking at the position in which the skeleton was found is that he was probably struck down and fell prone into the burning fireplace, says Clara Alfsdotter, osteologist at the Museum of Bohuslän who conducted the analysis.
Even though less than 3% of the ringfort has been excavated, the remains of over ten individuals have been uncovered and all of them show indications of having died in a violent massacre that took place around 1500 years ago.
A three-year research project on Sandby Borg, in collaboration with Linnaeus University and Stockholm University, will continue. The researchers will try to shed light on the mysterious events that took place one day, on Sandby borg on Öland, 1500 years ago.
