Meet the only known trebuchet casualty in history
Meet the only known trebuchet casualty in history
探秘史上唯一已知的投石机受害者
During a medieval siege, a trebuchet scored a chance hit on an unlucky defender. A small boulder slammed into his upper back at close to 300 kilometers an hour, smashing bones and crushing him beneath its weight. The man’s skeleton lay beneath the chapel of Scotland’s Stirling Castle, along with the remains of several other people who had clearly died violent deaths. But this one, known to us only as Skeleton 150 (or as “trebuchet guy” in your faithful correspondent’s notes), stood out even among that battle-damaged crowd because most of his upper body had been shattered. According to University of Bradford paleopathologist Jo Buckberry, who presented her research at the 25th European Meeting of the Paleopathology Association last week, Skeleton 150 is the only known trebuchet casualty in history.
在中世纪的一场围城战中，一台投石机意外击中了一名倒霉的守军。一块小巨石以接近每小时300公里的速度猛烈撞击他的上背部，击碎了骨骼并将他压在重压之下。这具骸骨被发现于苏格兰斯特灵城堡（Stirling Castle）的礼拜堂下方，与他一同被发现的还有其他几具明显死于暴力冲突的遗骸。但这具被我们称为“150号骸骨”（在笔者的笔记中被称为“投石机男”）的遗骸，即便在这些饱受战争摧残的遗骸中也显得格外引人注目，因为他的上半身几乎完全粉碎。据布拉德福德大学古病理学家乔·巴克伯里（Jo Buckberry）在上周第25届欧洲古病理学协会会议上发表的研究显示，150号骸骨是历史上唯一已知的投石机受害者。
A shattered skeleton
粉碎的骸骨
Skeleton 150 was in terrible shape, even for a dead guy. The man’s skull had broken in 61 separate places, and another 60 jagged bits of bone were distributed across his ribs. His right shoulder was broken, and his right leg above the knee was basically shattered. Buckberry and her colleagues threw everything they could, metaphorically speaking, at the jigsaw puzzle of broken bones: forensics, microscopes, X-rays, and micro-CT scans. All of those results pointed to a single moment of crushing impact by something heavy and fast-moving. The pattern of the injuries suggests that the man’s right shoulder and the back of his head caught the brunt of the impact, while his ribs probably cracked under the weight of something heavy slamming him into the ground and pinning him there.
150号骸骨的状态极其糟糕，即便以死者的标准来看也是如此。他的头骨碎成了61块，肋骨上还散布着另外60块参差不齐的骨碎片。他的右肩骨折，膝盖以上的右腿几乎完全粉碎。巴克伯里和她的同事们对这些破碎的骨骼拼图进行了全方位的分析：法医鉴定、显微镜观察、X光检查以及显微CT扫描。所有结果都指向同一个结论：他曾遭受过某种沉重且高速移动物体的瞬间碾压。伤痕模式表明，该男子的右肩和后脑勺承受了撞击的主要力量，而他的肋骨则很可能是在被重物猛烈撞击并压向地面时断裂的。
The bones had broken when they were fresh, so it was clearly not a case of “oops, we dropped a big rock on the corpse.” And the amount of force required to do so much damage in a single, shattering blow ruled out several messy possible ways to die during a medieval siege: Skeleton 150 hadn’t been trampled by a horse or run over by a cart, for example. Even if he had fallen from the castle walls, he probably wouldn’t have landed with enough force to do all of that, and the angle would have been all wrong. “The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains,” Buckberry told Science.org’s Andrew Curry. Assuming Stirling Castle hadn’t been attacked by time travelers, though, that raised new questions. “What is large and moving very quickly in 1304?” Big rocks flung by trebuchets, that’s what.
这些骨骼是在新鲜状态下断裂的，所以这显然不是“哎呀，我们不小心把大石头掉在尸体上”的情况。要在一次粉碎性的打击中造成如此严重的伤害，所需的力度排除了中世纪围城战中几种常见的死亡方式：例如，150号骸骨并非被马匹踩踏或被马车碾压。即使他是从城堡城墙上坠落，其落地力量也不足以造成如此严重的后果，且角度也完全对不上。“我能找到的最相似案例是车祸和火车撞人，”巴克伯里告诉Science.org的安德鲁·库里（Andrew Curry）。假设斯特灵城堡没有遭到时空旅行者的袭击，这就提出了新的问题：“在1304年，有什么东西既巨大又移动得非常快呢？”答案就是投石机投掷的大石头。
The physics of throwing big rocks
投掷巨石的物理学
A trebuchet works a bit like the world’s deadliest seesaw; at the long end of the seesaw is the sling that holds the projectile, and at the shorter end is a counterweight (a box of rocks or lead, 10 to 100 times heavier than the projectile). When the counterweight drops, its momentum raises the other end of the seesaw, tossing the sling up in a big arc. And when the sling reaches the end of its length, it stops—but the projectile keeps flying until it hits something. A typical trebuchet of the time could launch a 90-kilogram projectile (typically a big rock) a few hundred yards. According to this handy medieval trebuchet calculator, that means the projectile would have smashed into Skeleton 150 at somewhere between 200 and 300 kilometers per hour, depending on the exact weight of the projectile and the trebuchet’s counterweight, the length of the sling, and the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow. That’s an impact with a little over 200 kilojoules of energy.
投石机的工作原理有点像世界上最致命的跷跷板；跷跷板的长端是放置投射物的投石索，短端则是配重（装满石头或铅的箱子，重量是投射物的10到100倍）。当配重落下时，其动量会抬起跷跷板的另一端，将投石索以巨大的弧线抛出。当投石索达到极限长度时会停止，但投射物会继续飞行直到击中目标。当时典型的投石机可以将90公斤的投射物（通常是大石头）发射到几百码外。根据便捷的中世纪投石机计算器，这意味着投射物撞击150号骸骨时的速度在每小时200到300公里之间，具体取决于投射物和配重的精确重量、投石索的长度，以及一只未载重燕子的飞行速度。这次撞击产生的能量略高于200千焦。
Trebuchets and other siege engines were meant to take out walls and other fortifications. They weren’t anti-personnel weapons; people undoubtedly got injured by flying debris or collapsing structures, but medieval engineers weren’t aiming their catapults at individuals. Skeleton 150 just got terribly unlucky. “While the use of siege engines is well-documented, we believe this is the first evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record,” wrote Buckberry, adding, “The lack of directly comparable forensic cases remains a limitation.”
投石机和其他攻城器械旨在摧毁城墙和防御工事。它们并非反人员武器；人们无疑会因飞溅的碎片或倒塌的建筑而受伤，但中世纪的工程师并不会将投石机瞄准个人。150号骸骨只是极其不幸。“虽然攻城器械的使用有据可查，但我们认为这是考古记录中首次发现投石机造成的创伤证据，”巴克伯里写道，并补充说，“缺乏可直接对比的法医案例仍然是一个局限。”
Who was Skeleton 150? Scottish, probably
150号骸骨是谁？大概是苏格兰人
Skeleton 150 was one of nine people found in graves beneath the castle’s medieval chapel, to the surprise of renovation workers, in 1997. Five of the dead had wounds that suggested they had died violent deaths: a middle-aged woman had suffered two heavy blows to the side of her head before falling and being struck with a war-hammer, which left a pair of eerily neat square holes in the top of her skull. A teenage boy had been stabbed in the chest with a sharp weapon that left its mark on his ribs, then struck hard in the jaw, collarbone, and torso. It’s hard to say exactly who any of these people were, besides obvious medieval wartime casualties. All five of their remains were radiocarbon dated to around the Scottish Wars of Independence in the early 1300s, during which Stirling Castle was hotly contested real estate; it changed hands five times just in the eight years between 1296 and 1304, and the wars carried on until 1357.
1997年，翻修工人在斯特灵城堡中世纪礼拜堂下方的墓穴中发现了九具遗骸，150号骸骨就是其中之一。其中五名死者的伤痕表明他们死于暴力：一名中年女性头部侧面遭受了两次重击，倒地后又被战锤击中，导致她的头骨顶部留下了两个诡异整齐的方形孔洞。一名十几岁的男孩胸部被利器刺伤，肋骨上留下了痕迹，随后下颚、锁骨和躯干又遭到重击。除了显而易见的中世纪战争受害者身份外，很难确定这些人具体是谁。这五具遗骸经放射性碳测年，均可追溯到14世纪初的苏格兰独立战争时期。当时斯特灵城堡是争夺激烈的战略要地；仅在1296年至1304年的八年间，它就五次易手，而战争一直持续到1357年。