Medieval battlefield excavation

[eckadimmock]

Here's an interesting article on the excavation at Towton, site of a War of the Roses battle thought to be the bloodiest fought on British soil.

A couple of myths are exploded: that medieval people were short and had rotten teeth:

This physical diversity is unsurprising, given the disparate types of men who took the battlefield that day. Yet as a group the Towton men are a reminder that images of the medieval male as a homunculus with rotten teeth are well wide of the mark. The average medieval man stood 1.71 metres tall—just four centimetres shorter than a modern Englishman. “It is only in the Victorian era that people started to get very stunted,” says Mr Knüsel. Their health was generally good. Dietary isotopes from their knee-bones show that they ate pretty healthily. Sugar was not widely available at that time, so their teeth were strong, too.

www.economist.com/node/17722650

[noons]

I thought the myth was that before modern dentistry everyone had rotten teeth.

[gymnopodie]

“Given how much damage you can do with one blow, why land another 12?” he asks. There were signs of mutilation, too: marks on the left side of Towton 32’s head suggest that his ear had been sliced off.

Heh...

[sandwiches]

Townton was a fascinating battle. Probably very few English people have heard of it. It was a desperate affair as the article hints. The Lancastrians were winning until Yorkist reinforcements were sighted and the Lancastrians broke and were pursued and slaughtered. It was all particularly vicious and in bad weather too!I think there has been previous archeological evidence that fleeing Lancastrians were not just killed but mutilated.

[sandwiches]

Here,s an earlier report of excavations:

www.the-exiles.org/Article%20Towton.htm