A medieval warrior’s skull, recovered from a mass grave outside Visby, a city on the Swedish island of Gotland, has been brought to life by a digital artist. Killed in the 1361 AD Battle of Visby, in which 2,500 Danish warriors, mostly heavily-armed mercenaries, massacred 1,800 peasant farmers wielding farming tools, the warriors brutally broken face reveals the horrors of what is regarded as one of the most violent battles in European history.
Scientists took the 3D scans of the skull revealing that his eye and cheek bones had been smashed with a pole weapon just before his mouth and nose was split open with an axe. Using these 3D scans, and genetic statistical data, a digital artist has now brought this warrior back from the dead by recreating his heavily-wounded head and face.
The first excavation of the mass graves from the Battle of Visby in 1361, led by Oscar Wilhelm Wennersten in 1905. (Julius Jääskeläinen / CC BY 2.0 )
Darkness Unfolding On the Fields of Gotland
On 22 July, 1361 AD, almost 2,000 residents of the Swedish town of Visby on the island of Gotland were slaughtered by 2,500 invading Danish troops. King Valdemar Atterdag of Denmark had just conquered the neighboring territories of Skåne and Öland, and he was greedy to subjugate Gotland.
A Gutnish yeomen army of peasant farmers and their families came head to head on July 27 with the Danish warriors outside Visby’s town walls, and around 1,800 peasant farmers wielding farming tools were quickly slaughtered. Historians…
