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