In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, a succession of wars ravaged Europe. Massive armies squared off and massacred each other using cannon and rifle fire and mass cavalry charges that claimed tens of thousands of casualties in hours. At the 1815 Battle of Waterloo, Napoleon Bonaparte’s final battle, more than 10,000 men and as many horses were killed in a single day. Yet today, archaeologists often struggle to find physical evidence of the dead from that bloody time period. Plowing and construction are usually the culprits behind missing historical remains, but they can’t explain the loss here. How did so many bones up and vanish?
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.
This interview has been edited for concision and clarity.
Q: How did this research start?
Bernard Wilkin: There have been researchers excavating at Waterloo since 2012, and they have found just two bodies. But at least 10,000 men were killed there. That leaves 9998 still missing. That got us wondering—what if the fate of these men was different than we thought?
Arne Homann: Especially for the Napoleonic times, there’s this odd feeling—where are all the dead people?
B.W.: Together with German historian Rob Schäfer, I started looking in the Belgian, German, and British archives. We found that in the 1830s, the Waterloo area became a sugar beet production hot spot. There were two sugar factories within a few kilometers of the battlefield. The filtration process required burned bone—lots of it. Historical evidence suggests it came from the battlefield itself.
Q: How widespread was this practice?
B.W.: It turns out what happened at Waterloo was only the tip of the iceberg.
A.H.: The use of bone for the sugar industry was bigger than we knew. It was happening at Napoleonic battlefields all over Europe. Now we know where the dead went.
Q: Why would people resort to robbing battlefields when they presumably could have used animal bones from slaughterhouses?
A.H.: Europe’s population more than doubled in the 19th century. The markets for fertilizer and sugar boomed, and suddenly there was lots of competition for this particular resource.
B.W.: 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.
Q: Is it possible to prove this archaeologically?
A.H.: If you dig a burial pit into the subsoil, when you take the dead out and backfill it, the soil will be a different color. The bigger problem is recognizing that the pit you’ve found might have been a mass grave. I’m convinced we have documented examples of looted graves out there, but archaeologists didn’t realize what they were looking at. On every historic battlefield, we should have an eye out for emptied mass graves.
Q: Did this trade target other kinds of burial grounds, too?
B.W.: 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.
Q: Did this happen outside Europe?
B.W.: 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.
Q: Why were some battlefields and mass graves looted but not others?
A.H.: 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.
Q: How long did this go on?
B.W.: There’s good evidence it was still happening after World War I, on parts of the former Western Front. There are multiple instances of French lawmakers passing local laws to protect battlefields in the 1920s.
Q: It all seems … ghoulish.
B.W.: I wouldn’t say these were grave-robbing monsters. For the most part, they were poor farmers who seized an opportunity. In Belgium, there was maybe a sense at the time that these were foreign armies who came, destroyed everything, and left their dead. Locals didn’t have an emotional connection. They saw digging up bones as a pragmatic solution to their problems.