Digging Napoleon's Dead	Volume 55 Number 5, September/October 2002
by Jarrett A. Lobell

A mass grave in Lithuania stirs memories of the catastrophic French retreat from Moscow.

French scientist Michel Signoli inspects a mass grave in Lithuania containing as many as 2,000 skeletons. Study of the bones, including DNA analysis, will help determine the cause of death. (© Xavier Rossi/Gamma) [LARGER IMAGE]

Now a prosperous, post-Soviet city, the Lithuanian capital of Vilnius has had a turbulent and often violent history. Since its founding in the mid-thirteenth century, Lithuania, and especially its capital, was often at the center of conflicts between Russia and Poland, and more recently, the Soviet Union and Germany. When a mass grave was discovered by construction workers in the Siaures Miestelis ("Northern Town") section of Vilnius last fall, archaeologists called to the site suspected the bones belonged to Lithuanian victims of the Nazi occupation. Between 1941 and 1944, the Gestapo and SS annihilated the Jewish community, murdering some 200,000 people, the circumstances of whose disappearance have never been fully documented. Another possible culprit was the Soviet KGB, or its predecessor, the NKVD. The intelligence agencies' brutality over the 47 years of the Red Army's occupation of Lithuania is well known--more than 250,000 Lithuanians were sent to Siberian work camps. The location of the gravesite next to the former barracks of a Soviet tank division fueled this theory.

Archaeologist Justina Poskiene and physical anthropologist Rimantas Jankauskas of the University of Vilnius eventually solved the mystery. In addition to 1,000 to 2,000 human skeletons, they recovered buttons, medals, coins, and scraps of fabric, all pointing to the Napoleonic era. What they had found was the first mass grave of soldiers from Napoleon's Grand Army.

Jarrett A. Lobell is the photo editor and production manager of ARCHAEOLOGY.

© 2002 by the Archaeological Institute of America www.archaeology.org/0209/abstracts/napoleon.html

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