Bones went to fertilizer and sugar processing, book argues
In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of wars ravaged Europe. Massive armies squared off and massacred each other using cannon and rifle fire and mass cavalry charges that claimed tens of thousands of casualties in hours. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period.
There have been researchers excavating at Waterloo since 2012, and they have found just two bodies. But at least 10,000 men were killed there. That leaves 9998 still missing. That got us wondering—what if the fate of these men was different than we thought? Especially for the Napoleonic times, there’s this odd feeling—where are all the dead people? Together with German historian Rob Schäfer, I started looking in the Belgian, German, and British archives.
Q: Why would people resort to robbing battlefields when they presumably could have used animal bones from slaughterhouses? Europe’s population more than doubled in the 19th century. The markets for fertilizer and sugar boomed, and suddenly there was lots of competition for this particular resource. In the 1830s, bones were suddenly worth a lot of money.
The Waterloo battlefield became a hot spot for sugar beet production, with multiple sugar factories built on or near the battlefield. If you dig a burial pit into the subsoil, when you take the dead out and backfill it, the soil will be a different color. The bigger problem is recognizing that the pit you’ve found might have been a mass grave. I’m convinced we have documented examples of looted graves out there, but archaeologists didn’t realize what they were looking at.
At some point we know they ran out of accessible bones in Europe and turned to colonies abroad. The French dug up cemeteries in Algeria and shipped the bones to sugar factories in Marseille; we know the British imported mummies and bones from Egypt on an industrial scale, destroying untold heritage in the process. Places where the location of mass graves was within living memory, or within a generation, were in the most danger.
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