Scene of 1,500-Year-Old Massacre in Sweden

Archaeologists have discovered skeletons lying in their death pose inside an island fort in Sweden. The researchers think these ancient people were victims of an ambush. Wilhelmson, an osteologist at Lund University said that the site of an ancient island fort in Sweden, archaeologists have uncovered the victims of a sudden massacre, whose bodies were frozen in time for centuries much like the victims of Pompeii.

Researchers think hundreds of people once lived in single-family stone houses within the walled settlement on Öland, a long narrow island off the southeast coast of Sweden in the Baltic Sea. But the fifth-century fort seems to have been left in ruins after an ambush, recent excavations suggest

“It’s more of a frozen moment than you normally see in archaeology,” Wilhelmson added. “It’s like Pompeii. Something terrible happened and everything just stopped.”

In an initial investigation at the site in 2010, researchers found jewelry boxes with finely-crafted gilded broaches and sets of beads, hinting at former occupation. Later, researchers found traces of a house within the fort. In the doorway, they uncovered two feet peeking out, Wilhelmson said.

The archaeologists eventually excavated the full skeleton, which had signs of blunt force trauma to the head and shoulder. So far the researchers say they have found five sets of human remains, all belonging to people who seem to have met a sudden death.

“I don’t think anyone dared to go near it for a very long time,” Helene Wilhelmson, an osteologist at Lund University said in a video. “It’s like Pompeii. Something terrible happened and everything just stopped.”