Did grave robbers plunder battlefields? Bones went to fertilizer and sugar processing, book argues.

From the article:

In a new book, an international team of historians and archaeologists argues the bones were depleted by industrial-scale grave robbing. The introduction of phosphates for fertilizer and bone char as an ingredient in beet sugar processing at the beginning of the 19th century transformed bones into a hot commodity. Skyrocketing prices prompted raids on mass graves across Europe—and beyond.

Science talked to co-authors Bernard Wilkin, a historian at the State Archives of Belgium, and archaeologist Arne Homann, director of the City Museum of Salzgitter, about the historical trade and its implications.

The book is Bones of Contention: the Industrial Exploitation of Human Bones in the Modern Age, edited by Bernard Wilkin and Robin Schäfer. More about it here.

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Bernard Wilkin: In the 1830s, bones were suddenly worth a lot of money. In Belgium, the first beet sugar factories were built in 1833; the price for 100 kilos of bones went from 2 francs to 14 francs between 1832 and 1837. That’s a sevenfold increase in just 5 years. Battlefield bones were easy to find, easy to access, and no one really cared about them. A lot of farmers living near these battlefields realized there’s gold in the ground.

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This goes way beyond battlefields. At some point a local official in Paris suggested the catacombs under the city be emptied and sent to sugar factories. We know there were medieval cemeteries in Scotland and England that were emptied out and sold; measures to ban the practice were proposed, debated—and defeated—in the British Parliament.

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There are newspaper accounts from the U.S. of bone collecting on Civil War battlefields, but right now we can’t say how common it was.

At some point we know they ran out of accessible bones in Europe and turned to colonies abroad. The French dug up cemeteries in Algeria and shipped the bones to sugar factories in Marseille; we know the British imported mummies and bones from Egypt on an industrial scale, destroying untold heritage in the process.

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Arne Homann: Places where the location of mass graves was within living memory, or within a generation, were in the most danger. That’s why there’s so little left from the late 18th and early 19th century, but you still find battlefield graves from the Middle Ages.