In Denmark, an Ancient Army Met a Mysterious End in a Lake

Archaeologists have found the remains of hundreds of Iron Age fighters at Alken Enge—but they didn’t die there.

In 1944, at the height of World War I, ditchdiggers working in a field known as Alken Enge, on the Jutland Peninsula in Denmark, made a gruesome discovery: human bones. It was quickly determined that the bones were not evidence of a recent murder—they were actually thousands of years old.

Alken Enge itself has long been used as a “water-meadow,” an area that’s regularly flooded for controlled irrigation, and 12 years later, in 1956, another crew of ditchdiggers maintaining the field made another disturbing find: more human bones, including dozens of skulls. This discovery finally prompted archaeological excavations of the roughly 100-acre (40-hectare) site.

As the slow and methodical work of excavation progressed, it soon became clear that the entire wetlands area was littered with human bones. About 2,000 years ago, during the Iron Age, the Alken Enge water-meadow had been a lake, but the individuals whose remains were scattered around the site had not died from drowning. Their deaths had been more horrific—and what happened to their bodies after death even more macabre.

Many of the bones displayed the marks of raw violence: cuts from edged weapons, skulls crushed by axe blows, piercing wounds from spears and arrows. The archaeologists working in Alken Enge soon reached the conclusion that they were excavating not a series of individual graves, but rather the physical remains of a single catastrophic event: a massacre or a battle that had taken place during the early years of the first century.

Some 2,000 years ago was a period of extreme violence and social unrest in Northern Europe. The Roman Empire’s push towards the Elbe River had brought the disciplined legions of Rome into conflict with Germanic tribes who occupied what’s now Germany and southern Scandinavia. The tribes put up a hard fight against their Roman foes, even wiping out three Roman legions during the infamous Battle of Teutoburg Forest. The Germanic warriors were described by Roman authors as being tall, with reddish hair and fierce blue eyes. Before battle, they would howl and scream battle cries at the lines of Roman legionnaires, boosting the volume by using their shields like megaphones. It is easy to imagine the fear that such displays could rouse in the dreary gloom of an autumn day, on the edges of a dark forest as a fog descended.

To the Roman author Tacitus, the only positive thing about the Germanic tribes was their tendency to fight amongst themselves, rather than unite to unleash their full strength against Rome: “Long, I pray, may foreign nations persist, if not in loving us, at least in hating one another,” he wrote.

And such intertribal strife may have been behind the mass burial at Alken Enge. Weapons, pottery, tools, and other artifacts found with the human remains are of a local style, strongly suggesting the two sides of the conflict came from the Jutland Peninsula or nearby islands. There is no evidence of a Roman presence at the battle.

According to a paper published in PNAS about 21st-century excavations at Alken Enge, which uncovered more human remains, as many as 380 individuals were thrown into the Iron Age lake. But, mysteriously, that was not where they died.

The actual battle appears to have taken place an unknown distance from Alken Enge, and the dead were left on the battlefield there for as long as a year, exposed to the air and scavenged by foxes and wolves, according to analysis published in 2016 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports. After the bodies were skeletonised, someone—archaeologists don’t know who—collected what was left of the bodies, cutting away remaining ligaments and rotten flesh before depositing the bones in the lake.

The reason for what must have been both a significant effort and a rather unpleasant task is not clear. The deposition of war booty and sacrifices—human, animal, and material—in sacred bogs and lakes was a common custom across Northern Europe during the Iron Age. The bogs may have represented portals or gateways through which the living could commune with the gods, but in the absence of clearer textual records describing the purposes of such depositions, their function must remain speculative.

However, what’s clear from the analysis of the bones found in Alken Enge was that most of the dead had little to no prior battlefield experience. The bones and craniums show no signs of healed cuts, fractures, or other injuries typically found on the skeletons of seasoned warriors. The dead were all male, mostly between 20 and 40 years of age, though some were as young as 13. In life, they fought for their tribe and their chief. But in death, their bodies may well have served as trophies and sacrifices to the gods of their enemies.