agesilaos wrote:
Since half the bones are missing and the rest broken it must be one of those divine inspirations that allows Xenophon to declare that the female skeleton is intact! Stoning might not present further than broken bones, they are not going to have time to heal. The stories of Olympias' death are contradictory, hacked to death in Justin, stoned in Pausanias, but as you say gepd the big anomaly is the mound itself, it is never mentioned and that ought to make us look at an under reported era.
Paralus wrote:
On the skeleton itself, I do wonder how anyone's identity is ruled out given its current state which is quite damaged.
Agesilaos may need 'divine inspiration' but I do not. Simple logic based on the information we are given suffices. And I clearly mean relatively or essentially intact - of course every bone is not present.
Paralus, it seems, is not up to speed with forensic archaeological practices. Whether damage to a skeleton is pre or post mortem, or subsequent to burial, or even old healed wounds are all easily determined - even in the case of a cremated skeleton such as that of Philip II. Similarly it seems that these two are not familiar with the sort of skeletal trauma that would have occurred from being stoned to death [ or even hacked to death. Justin's somewhat lurid version is likely to be less accurate, not least because public execution, as opposed to military execution, in Macedon was usually by stoning, but the trauma would be similar in death by hacking.]
Olympias' execution will have led to severe skeletal damage from head to foot. ( She supposedly lay down and drew her robe over herself during the execution). When I was young, one could only see graphic images of such injuries in criminological text books and military medical manuals, but now there are plenty of online images of the hideous trauma victims suffer. The image below shows the surviving parts of the female skeleton - more than enough to show any skeletal pre or immediate post mortem injuries ( such as those on the males). According to the excavators and the official reports, they are emphatic that there is no such trauma to the female skeleton. No 'divine inspiration' needed, just common sense, and the knowledge that any skeletal damage occurred after burial, not pre or immediately post mortem. Nor is it credible that the only damaged bones might have been 'missing'ones.[ if Agesilaos or Paralus are familiar with probability theory, they can work out the odds - in practical terms, zero.]
In such cases, there is always severe head damage, and damage to the 'long' bones ( even when the victim is tied, which Olympias was apparently not )- and as can be seen, the skull is intact, even down to the lower jaw, and the long bones display no injuries either.
If you wish to consider that the female skeleton is even 'possibly' Olympias, then you must reject the sources accounts of her death. ( And that's ignoring the archaeological evidence that Olympias lies at Pydna )
Nor is there any 'anomaly' about the mound not being referred to in our histories etc. Northern Greece, Thrace and other nearby areas are covered in hundreds of anonymous tumuli and grave mounds - a reminder of just how many 'unknown' people are out there in the archaeological record, but not the historical one.
And the official view?
Prof Valavanis said :
"
It was a surprise that there were so many deceased buried in the same grave, not because it is unexpected that in a Macedonian grave one might find many dead – after all, Macedonian tombs are family tombs – but because our minds had become so side-tracked with the speculation and discussion over one prominent individual, that unconsciously we had become fixated on there being one deceased.
On the other hand, the anthropological findings were a nice reminder to all of us, myself included, that we should not develop interpretive theories before we collect all of the data from an excavation.
As we had said, the monument was built for one deceased, in my opinion for the person who was buried in the grave of the burial chamber.
[ Whether the tomb was actually built for the evnetual occupant is debateable]
Is there some ‘limit’ to the number buried in a grave?
No. Greater numbers, even up to 15 deceased, if I am not mistaken, have been found buried in the same Macedonian tomb.
We have no evidence to connect the Amphipolis tomb with Olympias and the Temenid dynasty, aside from the size of the tomb – which doesn’t necessarily by itself mean that it is a royal tomb, there is nothing else to connect it to the Temenid dynasty. Furthermore the attempt to link the tomb with Olympias is not supported by the facts. We had noted from the outset that Olympias was buried in Pydna, where she was killed, a fact which is confirmed by two ancient inscriptions.
We may never identify the dead in the tomb.The latest results not only do not provide us with additional facts to narrow down the identity of the key occupant, but they create additional uncertainty. I fear that we will never be able to identify the first deceased with certainty"
And that, in my view is a reasonable summary. We may not ever identify the entombed, who are likely to remain anonymous. Ironically, we can say with considerable certainty that the female skeleton is not Olympias, because the anthropological evidence is totally inconsistent with that being the case.