Archaeologists have unearthed “very rare” remains of humans and horses killed at the Battle of Waterloo more than 200 years ago, near Brussels, Belgium.
Scholars and an excavation team have found the complete skeleton of a man believed to be a soldier under the command of the Duke of Wellington, who died in a large confrontation with Napoleon’s French army.
The remains of the soldier were found in a pit in Mont-Saint-Jean, south of Brussels, near a farm believed to house one of Wellington’s field hospitals.
The excavations unearthed the bones of horses killed in battle, which were used to draw cannon, carry ammunition, and be used by military soldiers.
“I have been an archaeologist on the battlefield for 20 years and I have never seen anything like it before,” said archaeologist Professor Tony Jullard of the University of Glasgow.
According to experts, on June 18, 1815, as many as 20,000 people were killed when an Allied army under the Duke of Wellington’s Marshal confronted forces on the battlefield at Waterloo under the command of Emperor Napoleon.
The excavations in Belgium are managed by Waterloo Uncovered, a project to support military veterans and current soldiers who are struggling because of their experience in the armed forces, in fieldwork.
Founded in 2015, a team travels to Belgium for two weeks each year to excavate parts of the battlefield, including the field hospital and the village of Blanquinet, where some of the bloodiest fighting took place.
Rod Eldridge, who assisted in the excavation, said: “The search for human remains can evoke a wide range of intense emotions, from the excitement of their discovery to the apparent sadness and respect, because that is likely a soldier, like those who dig us. ”
Eldridge added: “While the war itself was bloody and brutal, the dead on both sides seemed fierce in the light of modern events.”
It is likely that many of the corpses were piled in undiscovered mass graves to remove from the battlefield the thousands of corpses that had been scattered.
Waterloo Uncovered explored this possibility in the first large -scale geophysical survey of Waterloo Battlefield in 2022.
The survey, led by PhD candidate Duncan Williams, will identify anomalies in the scene and likely highlight mass graves and large groups of missing minerals or structures that the team will discover.
Found in Mont-Saint-Jean, the skeleton was probably discovered in a ditch along the road next to the farm. In 2019, the charity discovered amputated legs in the same hole not far from the field hospital where an estimated 500 were amputated, and the legs were said to be “stacked in the corners of the courtyard.”
Earlier finds made by the team at the same site, including cannons from French rifles, suggest that Napoleon’s staff may have raided the hospital during the war.
They also discovered evidence of the important role of the Scots Guards in closing the North Gate at Hoguemont, which was previously mostly associated with the Cold Stream Guards.
Source: Daily Mail
Source: Arabic RT
