Did grave robbers plunder battlefields? (opens in new tab)

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

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?

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.

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

Medieval recycling was dark lol

Damn, this is dark.