Recherches sur l’identification des soldats morts au combat
During the winter of 2016/2017, an excavation near the hospital of Orthez revealed a vast grave from the Napoleonic period containing 26 soldiers belonging to the two opposing armies and killed during the battle of February 27, 1814 The international recruitment of the pit and the traumas observed,...
Enregistré dans:
| Auteurs principaux: | , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Langue: | Français |
| Publié: |
2024
|
| Sujets: | |
| Accès en ligne: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Résumé: | During the winter of 2016/2017, an excavation near the hospital of Orthez revealed a vast grave from the Napoleonic period containing 26 soldiers belonging to the two opposing armies and killed during the battle of February 27, 1814 The international recruitment of the pit and the traumas observed, directly linked to the fighting, make it a unique example among the known deposits and linked to the Napoleonic battles. Among the many lines of research offered by this unprecedented deposit in France, the identification of these soldiers is now possible thanks to the confrontation of historical, archaeo-anthropological, genetic and biomolecular data. It is a question of carrying out a real investigation in order to give each skeleton an identity by collecting all the individual data that can be obtained from studies and analyses: age, sex, physical information, geographical origin, environment and identification of the environment in which they grew up. The French uniform buttons discovered in contact with certain skeletons made it possible to identify membership of at least 8 French regiments that took part in the battle of Orthez and to perform an archival analysis of the available registers of the various regiments involved. They contain valuable information on the soldiers who participated in this battle, indicating their complete civil status, precise physical characteristics, the cause of their military “inactivity” (prisoner, wounded or killed), the place and date of death. These exceptional archives bring an additional dimension to the anthropological data. Their confrontation will serve as a repository for genetic data on their geographical origin and their phenotypic characteristics. This interdisciplinary research proves essential in the understanding of this deposit on several counts: the identification of the origin of the soldiers, particularly those discovered without furniture, their care and the treatment of the bodies according to their nationality (biological and military), the composition of the various armies, the recruitment criteria at the end of the First Empire, the attribution or even the mobility of the elements of uniform. |
|---|