Egypt's Theban necropolis holds over 400 tombs, a rich resource for archaeologists eager to learn more about that region's ancient history. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology outlines how Egyptian burial trends likely changed over the course of centuries, shifting from individual burials in elaborate coffins to reusing earlier burial sites for later interments, resulting in greater density and the occasional superposition of bodies.

There has been prior research on the reuse of tombs in Thebes. This latest paper focused on a Theban tomb known as 209 in the western necropolis, dating back to the early 25th Dynasty (754–656 BCE) and ultimately abandoned in the Ptolemaic period (305–30 BCE). The original owner was likely a high official of Nubian origin named Nisemro. Over the centuries, the tomb was prone to repeated flash flooding due to its location within an active drainage channel of the Wadi Hatasun, so it's a complex site, archaeologically speaking.

That made it ideal for what the authors term an "integrated archaeothanatological approach," incorporating collected data on body position, coffin use, superpositions of remains, and stratigraphic relationships with osteological analysis in order to reconstruct the chronological sequence of the burials. They focused on a site known as Side Chamber 3, one of the main secondary areas of the tomb that was largely undisrupted.

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During a medieval siege, a trebuchet scored a chance hit on one 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.

A shattered skeleton

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.

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It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. July’s list includes outfitting cyborg cockroaches with a tiny diving suit for navigating flooded terrain; confirmation that a Medici duke died of malaria, not poisoning; the best evidence to date that Betelgeuse is orbited by a companion star; and evidence that some ancient Egyptian princesses were skilled archers.

Sacrificial Incan boy died of blunt force trauma

Credit: Administrative Archive, Regional Museum of Iquique–CORMUDESI

It's known that the Incas practiced a human sacrifice ritual known as Capachoca, in which children were offered to the mountains and believed to become divine themselves, serving as intermediaries with the gods. This often involved pilgrimages to the remote sacrificial sites, with colonial accounts describing strangulation, asphyxiation, and blunt force trauma as the most common methods of sacrifice. Archaeologists have reanalyzed the remains of one such victim and concluded the boy died from blunt force trauma, rather than freezing to death as previously believed. They described their findings in a paper published in the journal Science Advances.

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