The Battle of Gotland was actually a massacre. The mercenaries of the Danish army, under the orders of King Valdemar VI, confronted the Gutes peasants on July 27, 1361 near Visby, the largest city on this Swedish island located in the Baltic Sea.
The local militia, ill-trained and ill-equipped, were practically exterminated at the gates of the city. About 1,800 people died that day and were buried in mass graves. At the beginning of the 20th century, archaeologists excavated 20 such mass graves.
Many of the fallen suffered savage wounds, brutal cuts, fatal injuries. The confrontation was cruel and bloody. Most of the human remains had severely damaged bones, mainly in the skull and legs. Most, moreover, were thrown into the ditches even with their clothes on. They were garments full of cuts.
Researchers from the University of Aarhus and the Brazilian 3D designer Cícero Moraes have worked side by side to represent one of the victims of this massacre, a soldier who perished after receiving an ax blow to the face, an attack that split his mouth. .
The skull was one of the items in a 2014 exhibition at the Stockholm History Museum on the Battle of Gotland. The display came with a warning to parents, considering that many of the skeletons (from large mass graves) they could “scare” children because their wounds were “disgusting”, anthropologist Katrina Friberg assumed.
From these remains, which presented a deep diagonal cut from the lower left jaw to the cavity of the nose, a facial reproduction has been made of how this peasant from the city of Visby could have been and how he would have been. affected the attack with an ax during the battle.
Several teeth appeared to have been knocked out by the force of the powerful ax blow to the face, the experts explain in their article. If the blow did not kill the man at the first change, what is certain is that it caused irreparable damage that caused his death.
The invasion of Gotland began on the west coast. King Valdemar Atterdag, who ruled from 1340 to 1375, wanted to gain control of a diverse (there were Russians, Danes, and Germans) and sparsely populated island that paid taxes from him to the Kingdom of Sweden.
"Many of the local soldiers were inexperienced militiamen who were massacred by the Danish army, with a cadre consisting mainly of well-trained mercenaries," the researchers say.
Cícero Moraes created two 3D digital facial models. The first, in black and white, depicted the man in a neutral pose with his eyes closed. The second incorporated a more speculative artistic approach, showing the man in color with dark hair, a bushy beard, and a brutal gash extending across the lower part of his face.
The skull had two other injuries, although the most notorious was the main one, at the height of the jaw, "due to the violence that it entails," the experts assume. When a modern ax was tested on the wound, the blade of the weapon fit perfectly with the hole in the bone.
