Finds from mass grave support accounts of ancient historians—to a point

Nearly 2500 years ago, two armies clashed outside the walls of Himera, a Greek colony on the northern coast of Sicily. Greek forces from Himera and the neighboring colonies of Agrigento and Syracuse battled their great rivals, the Carthaginians, who hailed from the African coast of the Mediterranean. Fighting raged across the city’s western necropolis, fallen warriors toppling among the tombs.
Though little-known today, ancient authors portrayed the 480 B.C.E. battle as an example of what made Greek culture great. According to Greek historians such as Diodorus Siculus and Herodotus, Greeks from various Sicilian cities united to help Himera fend off the Carthaginian invaders, sending heavily armed citizen soldiers into the fray. “There followed a great slaughter of the enemy,” Diodorus wrote more than 300 years later.
But in 409 B.C.E., the Carthaginians returned—and this time no one came to Himera’s aid. Neighboring Syracuse kept its troops close to home to ward off Carthaginian threats from the sea. Carthage’s forces won, leaving the city in ruins.
Ancient authors appear to have gotten the broad outlines of both battles right—with one glaring exception, according to a new study. DNA, chemical, and archaeological analyses of 30 skeletons excavated from mass graves in the necropolises of Himera, where the remains of nearly 13,000 people have been excavated since the early 1990s as part of a long-term research project, suggest the ancient Greeks may have had some help from outside mercenaries.
The results are “mind-blowing,” says Carrie Sulosky Weaver, an archaeologist at the University of Pittsburgh who was not involved with the paper. “It’s amazing how much we can tell about ancient episodes like this with this kind of data.”
Most ancient Himerans were buried individually. But archaeologists suspected that a handful of mass graves, containing the bodies of dozens of otherwise unusually healthy men between 18 and 50, might have been connected to the battles with Carthage. Weapons, including swords and arrowheads, were found among the burials as well, including one man buried with a metal spearhead in his chest cavity, notes Stefano Vassallo, an archaeologist working for the Italian cultural authority in Palermo who was responsible for excavating many of the bones.
Genetic analysis of the remains buried in 480 B.C.E. confirmed the idea that the Himerans had help from other Greek colonies. Men buried in tombs connected to that battle had more diverse genetic backgrounds, and the chemical composition of their bones showed many didn’t grow up near Himera, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.


But the alliance didn’t pull together when the Carthaginians came back. Seventy years later, the fallen warriors all had very similar genetic and isotopic signatures, supporting historical accounts that the Himerans fought that second battle unaided, likely contributing to their defeat. “It’s the most clear case I’ve ever seen of bioarchaeology corroborating what was written in historical records,” says study co-author Britney Kyle, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Northern Colorado.
Communal burials connected to the first battle turned up a surprise, however. When researchers analyzed DNA from nine of the skeletons buried in mass graves, they found the men had roots in Central Asia, the Caucasus mountains, Central Europe, and even the eastern Baltic, near what is today Lithuania. Chemical isotopes in their bones confirmed they were born far away, ruling out the possibility that they were second- or third-generation descendants of immigrants. And their good health in life argued against the idea they might have been enslaved.
The Greeks, it seems, weren’t above paying for help in a pinch, the study authors conclude. They argue these men were mercenaries from the distant edges of the known Greek world, given respectful but impersonal burials in Himera’s cemetery after the victory in 480 B.C.E.—an aspect of the battle later Greek writers left out.
“The Greeks were probably not keen to give any credit for their military success to a bunch of mercenaries,” says Gillian Shepherd, an archaeologist at La Trobe University who was not involved with the study.
Scholars knew the Greeks traded goods from the eastern edges of Europe. But evidence for mercenaries traveling thousands of kilometers to fight on a Mediterranean island “is novel,” says Franco De Angelis, a historian at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. “The idea that they are coming from this far away to fight will stun people.”
Archaeological analysis alone wouldn’t have revealed this wrinkle, says study co-author David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard University. Combining DNA and isotopic studies, he says, “provides another data point beyond what history and archaeology can give us.”