“The chops to the forehead are very tentative, very incomplete,” says Douglas Owsley, the Smithsonian forensic anthropologist who analyzed the bones after they were found by archaeologists from Preservation Virginia. “Then, the body was turned over, and there were four strikes to the back of the head, one of which was the strongest and split the skull in half. A penetrating wound was then made to the left temple, probably by a single-sided knife, which was used to pry open the head and remove the brain.”
This Smithsonian article on recent discoveries at the site of an excavation at Jamestown, Virginia, will be startling for some people, but I wrote about it nine years ago in a fictionalized account published as, "The Starving," a Kindle eBook. My story was based on early evidence published in a National Geographic interactive essay. Although I made up the victim in my story, the circumstances are frighteningly similar.
