Mapping the Bodies of Waterloo
ALMOST NO HUMAN REMAINS HAVE BEEN FOUND FROM ONE OF THE DEADLIEST BATTLES IN HISTORY. NEW RESEARCH FOLLOWS WHERE THEY MIGHT HAVE ENDED UP.
ON JUNE 18, 1815, the
Duke of Wellington defeated Napoleon Bonaparte’s army at Waterloo (then in the Netherlands, today in Belgium), marking the end of the First French Empire. For 24 grueling hours, the armies clashed in the mud with muskets, lances and swords, leaving 50,000 soldiers dead.
The battle was one of the deadliest of the century — and yet, almost no human remains have been found in the battlefield area. But now, for the first time, analysis of historical written accounts and artwork has been used to plot a map that may shed some light on the burials.
There are a variety of reasons the Waterloo dead are missing, writes Tony Pollard, director of the Centre for Battlefield Archaeology at the University of Glasgow, in a study published in the Journal of Conflict Archaeology in June. Many of the remains were burned as a means of disposal. Other accounts depict smaller graves so hastily dug that arms and legs stuck out, which may have been disturbed, separated, and turned into the ground by ploughs when the land around the battlefield was quickly reclaimed for farming after the conflict ended.
And, Pollard says, there’s a good chance many of the bones were stolen: Newspaper clippings from the era to demonstrate that people commonly looted human bones and sold them to make fertilizer. For example, one clipping from The London Observer in 1822 estimates that “more than a million bushels of human and inhuman bones were imported from the continent of Europe into the port of Hull.”
“European battlefields may have
The battle was one of the deadliest of the century — and yet, almost no human remains have been found.
provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertilizer,” Pollard said in a press release. Scavenging for trophies and souvenirs as well as clothing and other usable supplies immediately after the battle is well documented. And locals who watched or helped with the burials could have easily guided graverobbers to the gravesites. Considering the importance of bone meal in agriculture at the time, Pollard said, emptying the mass graves at Waterloo to procure human bones isn’t just a possibility, but rather the most likely conclusion.
And yet, it’s not a certainty. Pollard’s work lays out a counterargument that admits that the absence of contemporary accounts of the removal and sale of bones from Waterloo is puzzling — especially considering the written accounts and artwork of the time period give detailed information about the stripping of bodies, battlefield scavenging, burning of corpses, and burials in mass and single graves.
Those accounts will guide the next steps for Waterloo Uncovered, the archaeological project Pollard directs. His study analyzed and collated travel guides, personal memoirs, and letters from visitors to the site, as well as paintings and illustrations of the battle aftermath. The details gleaned from those sources were used to create a map plotting the most likely location of single and mass graves and pyres, in the first attempt to use historical accounts to locate Waterloo burials.
Waterloo Uncovered will use that map to inform its locations for upcoming archaeological work, looking for both extant remains and emptied gravesites that may have supplied Europe with bone-meal. “If human remains have been removed on the scale proposed,” Pollard said, “then there should be, at least in some cases, archaeological evidence of the pits from which they were taken, however truncated and poorly defined these might be.”