Dr Sarah Lockyer
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@S_Lockyer
#PhD | 🇨🇦 forensic anthropologist | 🎥 📺 📚 junkie | fière Acadienne | Peanut Butter Fudge Crunch ice cream-aholic | knitter |🧘♀️| 🏀 | 🏄♀️ she/elle
Long post: Have the bones of #ww1 soldiers been recycled by the Sugar Industry? One of the more shocking results of our research was the discovery that human bones from the battlefields of Verdun and the Somme seem to have ended up in spodium factories. You will by now have heard that the bones of those killed and buried on the 1815 battlefield of Waterloo ended up in the sugar industry. If not, you can read all about it here: thebulletin.be/soldiers-bones… On researching the topic, we discovered that the (illegal) practice continued far longer than we had expected. In July 1919 an article was published in the French press denouncing illegal exhumations on the old battlefields of the Great War and 5 years later, a Frenchman named Jean Lozier and his sons were arrested collecting bones, including human bones on Hill 304 and the Mort Homme. The Loziers replied with embarrassment that they had been advised to recover the bones. The mayor of their village, tried to defend the family, pointing out that death was omnipresent and that other bone collectors had taken human remains before. A few days after the scandal broke, the highest authority in the Meuse, the prefect, took radical measures to ban the collection of bones. Despite this decree, the press considered the measures taken by the authorities to be too weak. Other incidents took place in 1924. In Laon, two Poles, Michel Wilezak and Stanislas Mobialezij, were arrested and sentenced. Other prefects banned the collection of bones, but this proved pointless. The Somme was not spared. Le Midi Socialiste reported that the Amiens police had opened an investigation into the collection of human bones on battlefields, which were sold to a spodium factory nearby! Some salvagers, so the news announced, were not afraid to collect human bones, and parts of human skeletons were found in some batches of bones sold. This case highlights a fundamental problem, namely the extent on which the bones of soldiers killed in the FWW were Industrially exploited. In the absence of figures, we are reduced to guesswork. Hundreds of thousands of men have never been found and are still recorded as missing. It is clear that many bodies still lie buried in the battlefields, waiting to be discovered. On the other hand, locals had a free hand for at least six years after the fighting, given the absence of any hard legislation. The proliferation of cases in 1924 in different départements, once the scandal had been revealed, shows that this was not an anecdotal phenomenon. In France, the former battlefields of the Somme (where, as in the Nord Département of France in general) sugar beet farming is an agricultural mainstay, might hold tangible evidence of the practice. There is a unique discrepancy between the number of German soldiers killed (and buried) at the Somme between 1914-1918 and the number German graves still in existence today. One so grave that it can't be explained solely by the effects of the fighting, such as shelling. Many of these missing soldiers once had graves in well-maintained military cemeteries, which survived the war. Yet no trace is left of those buried there. The remains of thousands seemingly never made the final journey to one of the post-war cemeteries. More research into the subject is urgently needed. If you want to know more about this and the exploitation of human bones in general, have a look at our book Bones of Contention, available here: amazon.co.uk/Bones-contenti… Please share widely! #history #archaeology
What’s your act of micro-feminism? 😂😂
NEW: Iowa’s win over LSU shatters record for most-watched women’s basketball game 12.3 million viewers. STORY: theathletic.com/5386550/2024/0…
