Did grave robbers plunder battlefields? | Hacker News Reader

Did grave robbers plunder battlefields?

science.org

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Anyone who's played enough dwarf fortress knows that goblinite[1] is one of the most important sources of metals.

[1] https://dwarffortresswiki.org/index.php/Goblinite

And then I thought, we've known for some time that dead men make good fertilizer.

https://www.chroniclelive.co.uk/news/north-east-news/200th-a...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterloo_Soldier

In Belgium we (not me) used the corpses from the famous waterloo battle to refine sugar.

Yes indeed. Science.org recently published an interesting interview [0] on exactly that, that even made the HN front page.

[0] https://www.science.org/content/article/now-we-know-where-de...

The use of bone char to filter cane sugar is interesting -- but something that I'm finding puzzling is that the above linked article specifically says that the bone char was used for sugar beet processing, but many other online sources consistently state that bone char is never used for sugar beet processing, only sugar cane processing. Did it used to be used for sugar beet processing but techniques changed?

Based on some reading, beet sugar refining is easier because of less impurities than cane sugar. So the modern technique for producing white beet sugar is to use vacuum evaporation to crystalize out the sugar out of beet juice leaving the impurities behind. Maybe before vacuum evaporation was invented beet sugar had to be undergo chemical processing similar to cane sugar to remove the impurities?

The deeper you plough this field, the more fruitful the findings. No dead end in sight. This may even take the cake. Dark and heavy Belgian cake. Cake of the dead, so to speak.

This sounds suspiciously close to the Anglican Inquisition . . .

Well, for good reasons nobody expects the Anglican Inquisition ...

Can't tell if this is sarcastic or not but an entertaining example of everyone going straight to the comments (myself included). (for those who didn't see this is link is the same as the main post these comments are under).

Definitely sarcastic. And I only realized the loop after clicking on the comment’s link (I had visited the post before, but not read it)

The secret of Belgian chocolate, revealed

Those are African bodies.

The blood of the Martyrs shall water the meadows of...Belgium.

Close enough.

Honestly I rather my body be used for something useful than wasting space in a box underground.

> we (not me)

of course not you flemish, it must've been those perfidous walloons, hoor

I just remembered that the first time I read about this, I rummaged around for source material. There is a book from 1840 in which the processing of human bones from battlefields is described as productive and profitable. Carl T. von Natorp, "Ueber den Gebrauch und Werth der Knochendüngung", 1840 "On the use and value of bone fertilization"

There is a bad scan by google books of parts of the text written in German Fraktur, but on page 410 he's clearly talking about the English that started to collect bones from the battlefields to use as fertilizer in 1822.

https://books.google.de/books?id=PyRAAAAAcAAJ&pg=PA410&lpg=P...

... in the modern era. It's a given that fabric and metals are high cost of production from raw inputs, and pre-mechanisation would be far too valuable to just leave in the fields. Post mechanisation the problem is logistics. (The factory war era pretty much begins with the Napoleonic war: Marc Brunel (Isembards father) made boot making machines and block making machines for the british war supply chain. You can see the blockworks in Portsmouth harbour and bits of the machines are in the science museum, London)

I think "battlefield pick-over" is not a busted trope. Logistics means you use the stuff to hand, be it 155mm shells you captured taking a Russian trench system, or arrows left over from a stupid french knight charge over muddy ground towards english archers.

The point here, is that a vaguely disgusting re-use of the consequences of war, is that dead bodies turn out to be valuable, not just the grave goods around them. You want phosphates for fertilizer enough that digging up bones to burn to make it, is worthwhile. You would think that the slaughter of cattle and sheep provided enough but a few thousand buried soldiers is a pretty good deposit.

In times past soldiers piss has been used to make gunpowder, dung was used in leathermaking. What's the difference here to using urine, and digging up dead mans bones?

I remember hearing that there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases... Humans never have valued far enough removed dead...

And surely yes, if I were local peasant near battlefield I would go and pick through it after everyone is gone. Or at latest when most of the stink is gone... Metals at least had value.

For a while in Europe it was popular to eat mummies . . .

The Gruesome History of Eating Corpses as Medicine

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-gruesome-history-...

> there were so many mummies around from Egypt that they were used as fuel in some cases

Likely, but it seems they aren’t 100% sure of that at the Encyclopædia Brittanica. https://www.britannica.com/list/7-surprising-uses-for-mummie...:

“It was claimed by author Mark Twain that mummies had been used as fuel for locomotives. In his 1869 travel book called The Innocents Abroad, Twain describes the first railroad in Egypt. Because of the lack of trees and the price of coal, Twain claims that the Egyptians used mummies instead. He wrote, “[The fuel used] for the locomotive is composed of mummies three thousand years old, purchased by the ton or by the graveyard for that purpose.””

Also, FTA: “we know the British imported mummies and bones from Egypt on an industrial scale”

We know, anyway, that they used untold millions of cat mummies for locomotive fuel. In other news, Egyptians mummified millions of cats.

Now we make cat drones.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lW0hyg4kfaw

Cambyses II would be proud.

https://short-history.com/cats-caused-the-ancient-egyptians-...

So maybe the human mummies were just there to provide for the cat mummies needs, in the afterlife?

To use on the english trains ?

If you're seriously asking, I highly doubt so. Great Britain has massive deposits of relatively clean, accessible coal. They are mostly in Wales but also in England and Scotland. Therefore there would be little reason to import any fuel from Egypt; over that distance, the steam ship would probably consume as many mummies as it was carrying.

I highly doubt so too, which is why I'm wondering why they would import it en-masse. What value would mass remains have ?

Archaeology was a booming field in Britain throughout the 19th century, being a fashionable pursuit for predominantly upper-class individuals. Many private collections were started, and most of the great museums were founded during this time. Egyptology in particular struck a chord with European society at the time.

Just have a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_museums_with_Egyptian_... to get an rough idea of the extent of Egypt-mania in Britain; the 'UK' section dwarfs the others! So although that quote is rather vague, I strongly suspect that it is simply referring to the large quantity of Egyptian artefacts that were being excavated and moved to museums in Britain, especially after Epypt was annexed by and amalgamated into the British Empire in 1882.

Mummies were also used to make paint:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mummy_brown

I was told that by 1946 almost every French farmer from Normandy to the Ardennes had at least one Jerry Can.

>at the end of the day, what's the difference between a dead man's remains and a bucket of piss?

On long enough timescales there's no difference at all

What’s a block making machine? Or a block for that matter?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portsmouth_Block_Mills

It goes further than that. If you find someone who's almost dead but not quite, you can steal that person's organs, netting you way more than metals, weapons, or anything else you're likely to find on a battlefield.

"vaguely disgusting" has another dimension in the modern era. I read once that by contemporary standards human bodies are essentially hazardous waste and every graveyard is essentially a superfund site.

Wouldn't that be the formaldehyde in embalming fluid? And mercury from amalgam fillings.

Embalming is very rare in places like continental Europe, and large swathes of the non-western world has religious bans on embalming, so formaldehyde in graveyards is almost purely a problem in the anglosphere.

Also bioaccumulation of heavy metals.

Some claim is the preservative in food.

This is very cool actually! Human bodies take so many resources from the Earth to grow, the very least we can do is recycle what's left when we die. Body composting ("green burial") is an increasingly popular option today, but I wouldn't mind if my bones were used in manufacturing either. (Actually my biggest objection would be who's profiting off my bones. I've spent almost my whole life so far enriching billionaires, and it would be cool if that could end at my death.)

I think what's most surprising to me is that I didn't realize battlefield mass graves were actually so common in the past. At this scale it makes sense, but I had an idea from antiquity studies that war dead were expected to be brought home for burial. (That could also be untrue of antiquity tbh; burial was always an incidental topic.)

Maybe part of the explanation is that there weren't as many soldiers in these battles as historical accounts say. We're well aware that official Roman numbers of the sizes of armies were hugely bloated compared to reality. The same might well be true of later battles.

1800 is somewhat recent history (compared to year 1799 or -1).

It is interesting that stuff like this gets forgotten in such short time frame and requires investigation/ discovery.

It’s interesting to wonder, what common facts of today, will become mysteries for future historians.

Could history education usefully emphasize a theme of time-traveler surprise? - "You've traveled back in time, and find... wtf that's weird!"

Soylent Green is people, indeed.

Ah, the OG human resources. Into the bone crusher!

I mean, there were plenty of poor people, and there's free stuff, so...

If I might make a modest proposal…

If there's ever a plane crash I'm looking for cash and watches.

You wouldn't be the first to think of this

https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/07/fl...

I couldn’t find the right combination of search terms to provide a citation, but I’ve heard stories of plane crashes where locals took the flight data recorder or other critical pieces of evidence from the scene before officials arrived. Rewards had to be announced and paid out to get people to bring back parts so that investigations could proceed.

I'm reminded of the scene in Lord of War when an arms shipment lands on a dirt road. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kipeOTbUqvk

Don't forget to grab a garbage bag full of weed on your way out.[0]

[0]https://www.climbing.com/people/yosemite-dope-airplane-crash...

I don't have a link, but a similar story happened on top of a mesa near Moab, Utah, in the 1970s. Local climbers already knew routes to the top and hiked out with whatever they could carry before the feds could fully clear it.

Just hope the bears don’t get to the cocaine first.

Medieval recycling was dark lol

Damn, this is dark.

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