The face of battle? Debating trauma on medieval human remains from Princesshay, Exeter

Abstract

Physical evidence of weapon trauma in medieval burials is unusual, and evidence for trauma caused by arrowheads is exceptionally rare. Where high frequencies of traumatic injuries have been identified, this is mainly in contexts related to battles; it is much less common in normative burials. Osteological analysis of one context from an assemblage of disarticulated and comingled human bones recovered from a cemetery associated with the thirteenth-century Dominican friary in Exeter, Devon, shows several instances of weapon trauma, including multiple injuries caused by projectile points. Arrow trauma is notoriously difficult to identify but this assemblage shows that arrows fired from longbows could result in entry and exit wounds in the skull not incomparable to modern gunshot wounds. Microscopic examination of the fracture patterns and spalling associated with these puncture wounds provides tentative evidence that medieval arrows were fletched to spin clockwise. These results have profound implications for our understanding of the power of the medieval longbow; for how we recognise arrow trauma in the archaeological record; and for our knowledge of how common violent death and injury were in the medieval past and how and where casualties were buried.