A hastily built refuge—a grisly massacre—a turbulent period in European history 
 
 By ANDREW CURRY 
 
 Tuesday, February 16, 2016 
 
 The scene might have been lifted from the pages of a Scandinavian crime novel: Under a steely sky, a half-dozen skeletons emerge from the cold, wet earth. A strip of yellow and blue tape, fluttering in the wind blowing in from the Baltic Sea, holds back curious onlookers. Portable fences, the kind that go up around construction sites, form a protective ring-within-a-ring around the scene. Yellow plastic stakes mark the spots where bodies, some with clear evidence of brutal blows to the head with an ax or other edged weapon, have already been found. Slowly, trowelful by trowelful, a 12-person team of investigators is excavating the scene of a gruesome mass murder on Öland, an island several miles off the coast of Sweden. In the last five years, they’ve found body after body, sprawled out with many of their bones shattered, on the rough limestone slabs and gravel floor of a 1,500-square-foot house. But it’s a cold case. The floor is part of a house—the scene of the crime—surrounded by an oval ring of stones and earth, the remains of what was once a wall. Built around A.D. 400, it encircled an area the size of a football field. Now called Sandby Borg, the site is one of more than a dozen similar “borgs,” or forts, on Öland, all built during the Migration Period, a tumultuous era in Europe that began in the fourth century A.D. and hastened the collapse of the Roman Empire. The forts were like safe rooms in case of a siege or surprise attack and could be reached within a few minutes at a dead run from surrounding farms. Sandby Borg’s 15-foot-high ramparts once protected 53 houses and their stores of food. What remains of Sandby Borg’s walls now surround a flat expanse of grass, and aren’t even tall enough to break the strong winds. But 1,500 years ago, Sandby Borg would have been impossible to miss. Despite its defensive advantages, its end was violent and swift. In a sudden onslaught not long after its construction, its residents were slaughtered, with just enough warning before the attack to hide their valuables. Their bodies were left where they lay, on the floors of their homes and even in smoldering fire pits. The houses were closed up and the place was abandoned. It wasn’t looted after the murders, and neighbors on the densely populated island didn’t interfere with the site, so archaeologists believe that the area was considered taboo for years after the attack. As the turf walls of its houses collapsed, Sandby Borg became a shallow grave, with bones concealed just inches below the surface. It’s unique, says Helena Victor, an archaeologist at the Kalmar County Museum on the mainland just across from the island, because the attack and destruction were so sudden, and the site was never resettled. “This intact moment of an ordinary day is very important, because we know so little about daily life at this time,” she says. The Sandby Borg project began in 2010 in response to the threat of looting. Researchers at that time had little idea of what they would actually find. Archaeologists testing geophysical prospecting methods in the area noticed that treasure hunters had recently dug pits around the fort, perhaps looking for gold coins. Professional metal detectorists were mobilized to search for anything the looters had missed. They uncovered five different jewelry stashes from houses at the center of the fort. The caches include silver brooches and bells, gold rings, and amber and glass beads. There were even cowrie shell fragments, pierced to be strung on a necklace. 
 
 The deposits weren’t randomly placed. Each one was buried just inside the doorway of a house, to the left of the door. Victor, who directs the Sandby Borg excavation, immediately suspected that foul play was behind this arrangement. Her theory was that the women of the fort buried their valuables in predesignated spots. “It’s possible there was an agreement amongst the women—‘if something happens to me, here’s where you’ll find it,’” Victor says. To identify five separate deposits, Victor goes on to explain, is a sign that “something terrible must have happened. These are things you don’t forget or leave behind. Right away we realized they had all died.” Her curiosity piqued, Victor returned to the site in 2011. At that time, she dug three test pits, including one in House 40, a large dwelling in the middle of the fort in which the biggest jewelry stash had been found. On the last day of the weeklong dig, excavators made the grisly discovery of two human feet. The following year, Victor and her team went back to Sandby Borg and uncovered the rest of the skeleton. It was a man in his late teens, lying on his back. His skull had been split clean open by an ax or sword. To have been hit with that much force in the low-ceilinged houses of the fort, the victim must have been kneeling, his death an execution. Next to him was another young man, lying facedown. In Sweden, excavations are only funded in case of emergency; for example, if a site is about to be damaged by construction. Because there was no such threat at Sandby Borg, Victor had to scrape together funds for more small digs in the summers of 2013 and 2014. In 2014, they found the partially burned bones of an older man, facedown on top of a hearth. That the body was burned down to the bones in places suggests he was dead when he fell—otherwise he would have moved. “We make these assumptions sometimes,” Victor says. A child’s leg bone was also found not far from the older man, as though more evidence were needed that this had been no ordinary day. “It could have been a grandfather and his grandchild,” Victor says. “It’s a very clear sign someone killed everyone in the fort. Normally, raiders take the children with them [as captives].” The violent deaths deepened the mystery of Sandby Borg—and Victor’s determination to continue digging, at least until House 40 had been fully excavated. When Sandby Borg was built, Öland must have been a risky and possibly terrifying place to live—it has a seemingly endless coastline for seaborne raiders to land on and no natural barriers to slow down attackers. Even today, the island can be a strange, forbidding place. Twenty times bigger than Manhattan, it is flat, windy, and barren. Yet none of this has stopped people from settling there. The earliest signs of human habitation date back millennia, and the island is still dotted with Bronze Age burial mounds and Viking runestones. Two thousand years ago, Öland was connected to the mainland by the Baltic, and from there to the Mediterranean via established overland trade routes. Ölanders profited greatly from long-distance trade with the rest of Europe. Archaeological excavations and chance finds have turned up hundreds of Roman coins, bronze statues, glass beads, and vessels dating to the first four centuries A.D., when Öland had extensive contact with the Roman Empire. As the empire began to decline, Scandinavian warriors from the islands of Bornholm, Gotland, and Öland found that a set of skills different from what they had sharpened before was now in demand. They had traveled thousands of miles south between A.D. 350 and 500 to work as mercenary bodyguards for the last of the Roman emperors, who paid well to guarantee their loyalty. Ölanders had long brought their wages back to the windswept Baltic island in the form of Roman solidi, gold coins commonly issued in the late empire. The solidi found on the island are distinctive, matching dies that have been uncovered in Rome. “A lot of them are very fresh, in mint condition,” Victor says, without the characteristic wear of coins that have been passed from hand to hand in trade. “There’s a direct link to Rome, and later to Milan and Arles.” 
 
 If gold is any measure—and there’s every reason to think it was, considering the tiny holes Öland’s mercenaries drilled in their solidi to check the purity of the gold, and the high concentration of coins found on the island—Sandby Borg was home to some of the island’s most successful warriors. “When we mapped the solidi found on the island, 36 percent were within a mile or so of Sandby Borg,” Victor says. Then, around A.D. 450, the gold began to run out. The Western Roman Empire was at an end, and there were no emperors left who could pay for imported bodyguards. The latest dated solidi archaeologists have found on the island date to around this time. Archaeological evidence suggests that Öland’s social harmony collapsed along with its economy. Suddenly, the island was full of unemployed soldiers, all of them fingering their swords and eyeing their neighbors’ shining gold and imported glass beads. To protect themselves, people had already begun to build ringforts. In a phenomenon that seems to have been limited to Öland, small farms and hamlets were moved to be closer to the safety of walled borgs that were built to withstand serious assaults. The forts had high earthen walls and gates built using techniques brought home from Rome, with signs of crenellated ramparts and arched gates. The houses were arrayed in a circle along the inner wall and with a central block of houses in the middle. Archaeologists have identified at least 16 borgs on the island, all built at roughly the same time using nearly identical plans. Much of what archaeologists know about Öland’s ringforts comes from a 1960s dig at Eketorp, a ringfort about 20 miles from Sandby Borg that’s now an open-air museum. As the island’s society crumbled in the Migration Period, many Ölanders abandoned their scattered houses and took up permanent residence behind the tall turf walls of the island’s borgs. Eketorp had been occupied for centuries, from around the same time Sandby Borg was built, to well into the Middle Ages. “After work at Eketorp, the argument was that there wasn’t much more to learn about forts on Öland,” says Ulf Näsman, a Swedish archaeologist who led the Eketorp excavation decades ago and is now a professor at Linnaeus University in Kalmar. “Then came these finds.” Sandby Borg’s story is, in fact, very different from Eketorp’s. What archaeologists call the “cultural layer” inside the fort, the accumulated trash and debris of daily life, is thin. People lived there for a few months, at most, using it as a shelter rather than a home. “It was obviously built as a refuge and never really occupied,” says Näsman, who is helping excavate House 40’s hearth. That’s a sign that the community that sought protection behind Sandby Borg’s once-mighty walls was an early loser in the unrest that tore the island apart. “When the power struggle started, we think people moved into the fort and brought everything with them,” says Victor. “And then everything stopped. Nothing happened after this massacre.” Though speculating on how and why the massacre took place is captivating, the event itself is perhaps less important to archaeologists than its suddenness. Because life in the fort was extinguished so abruptly, the site has the potential to illuminate details of daily life in Scandinavia around a.d. 480. The fact that the fort wasn’t looted or burned afterward makes it even more interesting. The killers seem to have left the bodies of their victims where they fell, and then departed, never to return. “It’s compelling because people were killed inside the houses, and then the killers went out, locked the doors, and left,” says Näsman. ||||| About 1,500 years ago, in a ring-shaped fort, at least 26 men and women were massacred. Many of them were taken by surprise, with not even enough time to face their attackers — and their bodies were left to rot, unburied, on the Swedish island of Öland in the Baltic Sea. 
 
 Archaeologists have since excavated the 1,500-year-old fortress, along with other nearby structures, at a site that's now called Sandby borg. So far, they've discovered five caches of jewelry and the remains of the massacred individuals. 
 
 "The trauma evident on several skulls, on one man's shoulder and one man's hip resulted from blows aimed at the back or the side of the bodies," the researchers wrote in an article published in the April issue of the journal Antiquity. "This pattern leads us to conclude that the perpetrators comprised a large number of people, striking simultaneously in several houses, and that several of the victims were not in a position to defend themselves." [See Images of the Site of the 1,500-Year-Old Massacre] 
 
 In one house, archaeologists found the remains of at least nine people who appear to have been killed suddenly. The skeleton of half a herring suggests that these individuals were in the process of eating when they were suddenly attacked, the archaeologists wrote. 
 
 The dead were left unburied. "In houses where the roof turf did not collapse as a result of fire, the bodies would have been left to decompose unburied where they lay, until the houses eventually caved in," the archaeologists wrote. 
 
 "In most cases where human remains have been found in connection with battlefields or scenes of brutal violence, the bodies have been buried in mass graves," the archaeologists wrote. "This is not the case at Sandby borg, where victims were instead left where they had been killed." 
 
 The discoveries leave archaeologists with a series of questions: Who attacked the inhabitants? Why did they do it? And why were the inhabitants left unburied? 
 
 While the archaeologists don't have firm answers, they have turned up some clues. And since only 9 percent of the site has been excavated so far, plenty of yet-to-be-discovered artifacts could shed light on these puzzles, said study co-author Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, an archaeologist at Kalmar County Museum in Sweden. [The 25 Most Mysterious Archaeological Finds on Earth] 
 
 The inhabitants seemed to have been wealthy — or at least they wore exquisite jewels. "Each deposit contained a gilded-silver relief brooch along with various items, such as glass beads, finger rings and silver pendants," the archaeologists wrote. The brooches "were probably part of aristocratic women's jewellery sets." 
 
 "The riches found during the excavations clearly indicate that the fort was inhabited by people of the ruling elite. The reason that the jewelry caches and other riches were left was probably that they were hidden away, and that no-one lived who knew of them and could recover them," Papmehl-Dufay said. 
 
 The archaeological history of Öland Island offers another clue. Sandby borg is one of at least 15 forts found on the island that date back to the same time. The people who controlled these different fortresses may have been rivals. The fact that the victims were left unburied "leads us to believe that the perpetrators were still in the vicinity afterwards and possibly prevented people [from taking] care of the dead. This in turn could mean that the attack was carried out by another elite group on the island, possibly connected to another fort," Papmehl-Dufay told Live Science. 
 
 Analysis of the artifacts revealed that the massacre likely happened during the late fifth century A.D., after the fall of the Western Roman Empire (which occurred in A.D. 476). 
 
 "The assault on Sandby borg may have been the result of subsequent power struggles on the island, at a time when the political map and power structures were being rewritten across the European continent,” the archaeologists wrote. 
 
 There may also have been taboos connected to this fortress that deterred people from entering the fort and burying the dead. Even today, the locals have fears about the site. "Ever since we started working on the site, we've been told various versions of oral histories from locals claiming that the site should be avoided since it is 'a dangerous place,'" Papmehl-Dufay said. 
 
 Taboos about the site may have existed in ancient times as well. "I do find it most likely that the event was remembered and that it triggered strong taboos connected to the site, possibly brought on through oral history for centuries," said Papmehl-Dufay. 
 
 The scientists are currently writing up the results of their excavations and analysis. They are also applying for funding to continue to excavate. 
 
 Originally published on Live Science. ||||| A three-year dig has uncovered the shocking violence with which the inhabitants of the coastal village of Sandby Borg were struck down 
 
 
 
 Archaeologists in Sweden have uncovered startling evidence of a massacre more than 1500 years ago, when the inhabitants of a small village were struck down in their houses or as they fled along the street, and their bodies left to rot where they fell – with their treasures including beautiful jewellery and Roman gold coins. 
 
 At Sandby Borg on the shore of Öland island, off the south-east coast of Sweden, there was no escape. In one house an old man was smashed on the skull so that he fell into the fire in the open hearth, where his body was charred to the bone. In another a teenage boy, possibly trying to flee, tripped over a body lying on the floor, and died where he fell. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Archaeologists working at the massacre site of Sandby Borg. Photograph: Daniel Lindskog 
 
 Such an aura of horror clung to the site that when archaeologists went in to uncover the gruesome facts, local people warned them they should keep well away from the green mound within the low stone wall. 
 
 
 
 After three seasons of excavation, with less than a tenth of the site excavated, the team which publishes its findings today in the journal Antiquity, believes they have uncovered evidence of a catastrophic end to the life of the village – “a single event that made time stop – like a shipwreck but on land”. 
 
 In the mid 5th century Sandby Borg had been a prosperous village built within the walls of a ring fort. After the attack nobody ever came back either to bury the dead, to loot their precious possessions or to take their valuable livestock. The dead – nine in just one house – rotted where they fell, lying in their houses until the roofs decayed and collapsed in on them, or sprawled in the village street, and their animals starved to death in their pens. 
 
 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest Even 1500 years later, there are persistent stories locally about Sandby Borg being a dark and dangerous place. Photograph: Sebastian Jakobsson 
 
 Scattered among treasures including Roman gold coins, silver gilt jewellery, silver hair ornaments, intricate glass beads and cowrie shells from the Mediterranean, the archaeologists even found scraps of the last meals, including half a herring still lying by a hearth, and cooking pots where they were last set down until crushed by the collapsing roof. 
 
 Ludwig Papmehl-Dufay, an archaeologist from the team at the local museum, which began excavations after warnings that the site was being targeted by treasure hunters, said that while no written or oral history of the massacre survived, there were persistent stories that it was regarded locally as a dangerous place. “I do find it most likely that the event was remembered and that it triggered strong taboos connected to the site, possibly brought on through oral history for centuries.” 
 
 
 
 The archaeologists hope to return to the site this summer, but after three seasons of excavation have uncovered enough mysteries to keep them busy through several winters. Stuffed into the skull of one man they found four sheep’s teeth. Papmehl-Dufay suggests that they may represent a final insult, the opposite to ancient beliefs of placing a coin or other small valuable with the dead to pay for passage to the afterworld, instead a contemptuous curse to prevent it. Nearby they found one bone from a tiny arm, the first evidence that children were not spared. 
 
 
 
 Among all the covetable possessions found among the three houses excavated and the 26 bodies discovered, they found no weapons – they speculate that they may have been taken as trophies, and could still lie dumped as a ritual offering into a nearby bog. 
 
 Facebook Twitter Pinterest The end mount of sword found at Sandby Borg. Photograph: Daniel Lindskog 
 
 Öland is a low island off the Swedish coast in the Baltic Sea, and in the Roman period it was wealthy. The Roman gold coins, and the luxury imports found among the scattered corpses, may represent wages earned fighting as mercenaries. The island has rich archaeology including foundations of more than 1000 stone houses, thousands of cemeteries and graves, and at least 15 ringforts – of which only Sandby Borg seems to have come to such a gruesome end in the turbulent decades when the Western Roman Empire collapsed and local tribes vied for power. 
 
 The Kalmar county museum has a small exhibition about the site, and hopes to create a larger permanent display on a story which even the archaeologists working on it found uniquely disturbing. Only three of the 53 houses have been fully excavated, but test pits show that many more human remains still lie waiting for their story to be told at last. 
 

– "In most cases where human remains have been found in connection with … scenes of brutal violence, the bodies have been buried in mass graves. This is not the case at Sandby borg," write the authors of a new study published in the journal Antiquity. The Swedish site, found on the island of Öland in the Baltic Sea, was a once-thriving village that in the mid-fifth century was wiped out by attackers—who left the bodies to decompose where they fell. The Guardian reports that after excavations over three years, just 10% of Sandby borg, located within the walls of a ring fort, has been uncovered. Archaeologists had been warned treasure seekers were messing with the site, and for good reason: Roman gold coins, silver hair pieces, and glass beads have been found, likely left behind because they were hidden, and "no one lived who knew of them and could recover them," archaeologist Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay tells Live Science. But the more noteworthy finds were those of a more gruesome nature. Papmehl-Dufay says no oral or written history of the massacre survived, but the 26 bodies thus far uncovered do tell a tale. The archaeologists believe there were a "large number" of attackers who struck "simultaneously in several houses, and that several of the victims were not in a position to defend themselves." In one case, the remains of an elderly man were found with a smashed skull and charred pelvic bones, likely the result of him falling into an open fire after taking the blow to the head. Papmehl-Dufay says the island was home to at least 15 forts (Archaeology.com notes "borg" means "fort") at the time, and speculates that "another elite group on the island, possibly connected to another fort," may have been behind the attack. (Archaeologists say they found proof of a massacre on Dutch soil by Julius Caesar.)