Exactly 207 years on from the 19th Century battle that saw the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte, researchers from the University of Glasgow have published a study suggesting that the bones of the fallen soldiers were later sold for use as fertiliser.
The researchers came to the grisly conclusion after poring over a batch of newly discovered drawings and written descriptions of the battlefield made shortly after Napoleon’s defeat.
In total, these accounts describe the precise locations of three mass graves containing up to 13,000 corpses. However, there is no reliable record of a mass grave ever being found at the site, says lead researcher Prof Tony Pollard.
In fact, only a few remains from the battle have so far been discovered. These include a skeleton found during the building of a museum at the site in 2015 and amputated leg bones found during the excavation of the field hospital in 2019.
As several newspaper articles from the same period mention the gruesome practice of looting human bones from European battlefields to turn into fertiliser, Pollard suspects this may well have happened at Waterloo.
“European battlefields may have provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertiliser. One of the main markets for this raw material was the British Isles,” said Pollard.
“Waterloo attracted visitors almost as soon as the gun smoke cleared. Many came to steal the belongings of the dead, some even stole teeth to make into dentures, while others came to simply observe what had happened.
“It’s likely that an agent of a purveyor of bones would arrive at the battlefield with high expectations of securing their prize.
“Primary targets would be mass graves, as they would have enough bodies in them to merit the effort of digging the bones.”
Pollard now plans to lead an unprecedented geological survey of the area that is likely to last for the next several years.
“The next stage is to head back out to Waterloo, to attempt to plot grave sites resulting from the analysis of early visitor accounts reported here,” he said.
“If human remains have been removed on the scale proposed then there should be, at least in some cases, archaeological evidence of the pits from which they were taken, however truncated and poorly defined these might be.”
Read more about archaeology: