The Sandby Borg archaeological site in Sweden held a sordid history, the first clues of which began to emerge in 2010. Archaeologists discovered numerous intact pits full of jewelry and other valuable objects. When the Kalmar County Museum team returned to this fortified village on the island of Öland a year later, the mystery deepened: they discovered human remains there.
In the years that followed, twenty-six bodies were unearthed at Sandby Borg, a windswept site adjoining a beach. The positioning of the corpses and the forensic analyzes led to the same terrifying conclusion: one day, at the end of the Ve century, carnage was perpetrated at Sandby-Borg. Victims, including children, were caught unawares, killed, and left where they died. From these clues, the team attempts to reconstruct what happened there more than 1,500 years ago.
The narrow island of Öland lies off the eastern coast of Sweden, about 400 kilometers from Stockholm. It is a place covered in alder forests, meadows and beaches battered by the incessant wind from the Baltic Sea.
Sandby Borg is just one of dozens of Iron Age ring forts on Öland. Measuring just over half a hectare, it was enclosed by an oval wall, the silhouette of which is still visible today. Archaeologists believe that this wall once measured nearly five meters high and protected fifty-three homes.
