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"It's shattered, and it's a horrific fracture of that leg."ĭoug Owsley, chief physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian, has been able to roughly estimate where the soldiers may have come from, based on isotopic signatures in water they drank during their lifetime.īruwelheide and Owsley say the limb pit provides a unique look at the early days of combat medicine in the U.S. "You can see this right femur, high up, it's got a fracture up in the upper thigh," he says. He shows me one of the soldiers' bones with the kind of wound a Minié ball could cause. and low velocity, and they really caused a lot of damage," says Doug Owsley, the museum's head physical anthropologist.
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Many soldiers had been hit by a new kind of bullet-a soft, heavy projectile called a Minié ball. That's one of the things the Smithsonian team is trying to illuminate from the bones and written records left by surgeons and soldiers. Says Bies: "If you could imagine sitting with a horrific wound of your own and hearing the moans and screams and seeing a growing pile of limbs from the surgeon, and knowing that your turn was coming, I can't possibly imagine what that would have been like."
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And so the water was tainted, every single house (and) barn was occupied by wounded soldiers, and these surgeons had very little to work with." What they did have was a standard surgeon's kit, with a variety of saws, and maybe some chloroform to knock their patients out. During the second Bull Run battle, he says, "Over 100,000 soldiers had trampled, shot, exploded, eaten, burned everything. They left behind thousands of wounded on the battlefields at Manassas, some for days, until surgeons arrived.īrandon Bies, superintendent of the National Park Service's Manassas site, is also an archaeologist and Civil War expert.īies says it would have been a terrible scene. You can imagine the din of thousands of these firing throughout the battle.Īfter three days of fighting, Union forces retreated. He rams the charge down the barrel, cocks the hammer and fires. He loads the original Enfield from the Civil War with black powder (though without a bullet). "Men are dropping left and right."īies has brought a musket along to the Deep Cut site. "As (Union soldiers) start to get closer, within 300, 400 yards, they start to receive rifle fire and musket fire," he says. He says in 1862 it was likely pasture, with no cover. Bies takes me there it's a gentle slope that's lush with spring growth. The limbs had been evenly cut (left), and researchers were able to identify bullet holes (right).īies says these men were likely wounded during a charge up to a ridge called the Deep Cut, held by thousands of Confederates. The Park Service sent them to some of the world's leading forensic anthropologists at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C. "Just pieces of bone," says Bies, who is now superintendent of the Manassas site. The National Park Service runs the site, and fortunately it had an archaeologist and Civil War expert on hand: Brandon Bies.īies says at first they weren't sure what they had. The bones first surfaced in 2014 when a utility crew was digging at the Manassas National Battlefield Park. It's the first "limb pit" from a Civil War battlefield to be excavated, and experts say it opens a new window on what is often overlooked in Civil War history: the aftermath of battle, the agony of survivors and the trials of early combat surgeons. The remains are the amputated limbs of wounded Union soldiers. Scientists have uncovered a pit of human bones at a Civil War battlefield in Virginia. Scientists at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History have been analyzing the bones to learn more about them and to whom they may have belonged. A pit of amputated limbs and two nearly complete skeletons that date back to the Civil War were discovered at Manassas National Battlefield Park in Virginia.