Travellers reported seeing corpses being dug up, and members of parliament denounced the traffic in 'putrid bones'. Local farmers struggling to make ends meet would plunder graves, according to written sources from 1834. The market value of bones - theoretically animals - soared.” “The sugar industry was established with bone ovens. “Around 1820, sugar beet supplanted wheat near Waterloo,” Liège historian Bernard Wilkin told Belga. Instead it’s used primarily as a pigment. The powder is still in use today but only with animal bones and no longer in the sugar industry. They then cooked the bones in ovens to make a powder known as “noir animal” (“animal black”) that filtered sugar syrup as part of the production process. The team of researchers concluded that in the aftermath of the conflict, peasants dug up the corpses and sold them to people in the sugar industry. The town, south of Brussels, became famous as the site of Emperor Napoleon I final defeated.īut mystery surrounded why so few human remains were unearthed in the years following the history-changing battle. Two Belgian and German historians and a British archaeologist made the grisly revelation, which may explain why so few skeletons were found after such a bloody conflict, reports RTBF.Īround 20,000 soldiers were killed in the fighting on 18 June 1815 at Waterloo. The bones of soldiers who died in the Battle of Waterloo were used in 19 th-century Belgium’s burgeoning sugar industry, researchers have discovered.
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