'Skeleton 150' Is First Confirmed Trebuchet Victim

Archaeologists say they've identified the first confirmed victim of one of medieval warfare's most fearsome machines: the trebuchet. The remains, labeled "Skeleton 150," belong to a man in his 20s who died while Scotland's Stirling Castle was besieged by English forces in the early 1300s. His bones were shattered in more than 160 places, with his skull broken 61 times. His injuries were so extreme that modern equivalents are mostly found in high-speed car or train collisions, Science reports.

University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry, who worked with Historic Environment Scotland, said the man was almost certainly struck from behind by a massive projectile during King Edward I's 1304 siege. Forensic experts say the pattern of blunt-force trauma rules out a fall, trampling, or post-burial damage, and instead points to a single, ultra-high-energy impact—likely a boulder hurled by Edward's famed "War Wolf" trebuchet. Though contemporary accounts don't note human casualties from the weapon, the skeleton, buried hastily inside the castle chapel along with other defenders who died violent deaths, may be the first confirmed archaeological evidence of a person killed by a medieval siege engine.

• "It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity. The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains," Buckberry said. "But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?"
• James Macivor at Historic Environment Scotland has more background on the siege, which he describes as an attempt to "pummel this last stronghold of Scottish independence into submission." The castle's governor, Sir William Oliphant, had held out for months but in an attempt to save the castle and his men, he surrendered when he saw the War Wolf in the final stages of construction. The surrender, however, was not accepted and a missile from the trebuchet shattered a castle wall. "Edward was not in a particularly generous mood," Macivor writes. "This was to be the final nail in the coffin of the Scots and he wanted them to know it. He had a gallery constructed for the ladies of the court to view this humiliating spectacle."