Arghhh! Ah'm All Squashed!

Tuckerfan · Aug 11, 2026

First skeleton of someone killed by a trebuchet discovered.

Shattered skeleton in Scottish castle is first confirmed death from trebuchet

For one 20-something defender of Scotland’s Stirling Castle, death came from above—and arrived very, very quickly. Known to archaeologists as Skeleton 150, the man was killed more than 700 years ago by a massive blow that shattered his skeleton in dozens of places before pinning him to the ground.

In a presentation at the biannual European meeting of the Paleopathology Association in Berlin last week, University of Bradford bioarchaeologist Jo Buckberry called the skeleton the first confirmed evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record. “The breaks indicate a very large area of impact and devastation,” she says. “It’s likely the individual was killed by a siege engine.”

“It’s convincing,” says Lukas Waltenberger, a forensic osteologist at Vilnius University who researches blunt force trauma but was not part of the research. “It seems like a high-velocity, high-force, high-speed impact in a short amount of time.”

Skeleton 150 came to light in 1997, when excavations underneath Stirling Castle’s chapel uncovered the graves of nine skeletons dated to the early 1300s. Five, including Skeleton 150, dated to the 1300s. Their bones bore injuries and cut marks indicative of violent lives—and violent deaths.

That made sense: The early 1300s was a period of intense conflict between English and Scottish forces, who were fighting for their independence. And Stirling Castle—known as the gateway to Scotland—was the linchpin of several of those military campaigns. Located on a key road toward Edinburgh, the fortress changed hands five times between 1296 and 1304, when it fell to English forces after an extended siege.

Working with Historic Environment Scotland to examine the bones, Buckberry found cut marks, penetrative injuries, blunt force trauma and other indicators of combat on several skeletons. In addition, those bodies were buried inside the castle chapel, an unusual practice at that time—suggesting they might have died during a siege, when burial outside the castle walls wasn’t an option. Taken together, those clues indicated to Buckberry that the people might have died during the 1304 siege.

Skeleton 150 stood out. Buckberry counted more than 160 separate fractures on the 165-centimeter-tall remains, including a skull smashed in 61 places, a deep, zigzag break to a shoulder, and nearly 60 strange, zigzagging breaks to the ribs. “It’s very clear the energy is going through the chest,” says Uppsala University biological anthropologist Patrick Randolph-Quinney, who worked with Buckberry on the skeletal analysis. “The individual is pinned to the ground quite quickly afterwards.”

The extensive injuries to the rest of the body—particularly the strange breaks on the rib cage and a shattered right leg—ruled out the most obvious possibility, a head-first fall from the castle’s walls. The shape and texture of the breaks eliminated trampling by horses and damage to the skeleton after burial.

A 14th century warrior’s skull was broken in 61 places, evidence he was probably hit by a siege engine.

To solve the mystery, Buckberry scoured the forensic and medical literature and searched through anatomical collections for equivalent injuries. “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 says. “But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304 [C.E.]?”

Buckberry found the likeliest answer in history books. During Edward I’s 1304 siege of the castle, English forces deployed the recently invented trebuchet, a weapon first documented in the 12th century. A cousin to the catapult, trebuchets were capable of hurling boulders weighing more than 100 kilograms hundreds of meters. One at Stirling, dubbed “War Wolf,” “was the biggest trebuchet ever built at that point,” Buckberry says. Eyewitness accounts confirm the giant siege engine was used during the 1304 battle, tearing through two stone walls “as an arrow would fly through a piece of cloth.”

Accounts of the battle don’t mention any trebuchet casualties. But Buckberry says Skeleton 150’s injuries strongly suggest at least one defender was hit from behind by a flying boulder, launched by War Wolf or one of the other siege engines arrayed outside Stirling Castle’s walls. “It’s a huge amount of energy delivered in milliseconds,” Waltenberger says. “In skeletons from past times you rarely see this.”
Click to expand...

Tuckerfan · Aug 11, 2026

Wait! It gets even more fucked up! The castle had already surrendered when the trebuchet was completed. Edward I was pissed he didn't get to try it out in combat, so he made the folks stay in the castle until he could fire a shot at them. No shit. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warwolf

Log in or Sign up

Arghhh! Ah'm All Squashed!

Tuckerfan BMF

Tuckerfan BMF