How to Make Sense of a Mass Grave

In 2011, in the German province of Saxony-Anhalt, archaeologists were surveying a battlefield from a long-ago war when they detected the edge of a pit. As they probed the area further, they found that they had discovered a mass grave.

They began to excavate a pit about 11.5 feet by 15 feet in size, but from the moment news of the discovery began to spread, the archaeologists, who worked for government agencies, worried that treasure hunters would start to raid the site. They had already found evidence of illegal excavations.

Usually, a find like this might be carefully dissected in the place where it was found. But in this case, in part because of their worries about theft, the archaeologists decided to “block lift” the bones from the site—to cut the entire mass grave out of the ground and transport it somewhere safe.

There were other reasons to keep the grave intact, too, as the archaeologists write in “The Face of War,” their recent PLOS One report. “By coincidence, or perhaps intentionally, the last body placed in the grave was lying in a different position to the other individuals, in a cruciform pose on top of the other deceased. This crucial aspect of the overall impression would have been lost if the usual method of ‘dissecting’ the block had been applied,” they write.

But perhaps most importantly, keeping the grave intact conserved the powerful image, seen above, of these 47 individuals who died in the war. To the archaeologists, it was “a representation of war in all its cruelty.”

The people in this grave died during the Thirty Years’ War, the 17th-century conflict that reshaped the Holy Roman Empire, and they died in a battle known as one of the more pivotal and grisly conflicts of the war. Thousands of soldiers—perhaps as many as 9,000—died during the Battle of Lützen. The casualties included the King of Sweden, Gustavus Adolphus, who had been fighting to extend Sweden’s territory and power.