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Comment by JetAlone | Hacker News Reader

"What’s a little strange, however, is how little archaeological evidence of torture in the past has been found so far. Archaeologists have found evidence of violence between humans dating back to the Paleolithic, but the Milanese wheel victim is one of very few clear cases of actual torture, despite how often torture is mentioned in historical records beginning in ancient times."

My first hypothesis would be that mentioning torture far more often than using it proved effective? Make loud examples.

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For me, my first hypothesis would be that they never gave torture victims nice burials where their skeleton would be preserved for future archaeologists. Maybe they were left in a field for vultures and wild animals to get at, or thrown in a midden.

That was something I considered too. I have to ponder, why might they have given this particular body a recognizable burial?

In the article they theorize that he might have been considered a plague spreader. A burial would be a much better way to contain further spread compared to many of the other alternatives (though one might wonder why they didn't just burn the body).

Getting into wild speculation, one interpretation of the "Miasma Theory" could go like this: "Diseases comes from bad vapours. Very nasty disease is in this body. Therefore if we burn this body, miasmic smoke could come out of it."

my first thought when seeing the pictures in the article is someone took care of reassembling and burying the body correctly, so it must be an important person

Okay, that's an interesting idea. Do you figure maybe the skeleton's abnormalities could be related to inbreeding common in aristocratic families?

exactly what I thought. I imagined a story about inheritance, a man with an Iron mask and a lot of family politics

The "third degree" of interrogation is actual torture. The less well known first degree was being shown the implements of torture, and the second degree was being made to watch somebody else get tortured.

Could have sworn there was a thread on this a while back on how most of these torture devices were not used a lot and many are exaggerations for the sake of being dramatic.

"See that nice device? you're going in there next if you don't spill the beans" could be quite convincing, especially if told to someone already being tortured in milder ways.

I think in those times torture was more common as a punishment or a way to force a desired confession before execution, rather than an extraction of valuable information.

I mean it seems like in the vast majority of cases torture wouldn’t leave a lot of marks at the bone level, which means skeletons of tortured people don’t really look all that different.

You're right to call out an assumption that torture methods always leave behind clear skeletal forensics. I think some of us might have read that into the article. In this case if the article is correct, the wheel did leave clear evidence, which I interpret to suggest that the wheel was less popular than more commonplace methods of torture, or that the wheel was popular and remains are undiscoverable to us today due to "disgraceful burial".

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