Lisbon mass grave reveals tragedy of 1755 quake

LISBON, Portugal (AP) — It was a chilling discovery: a mass grave of human bones — skulls smashed and scorched by fire, dog bites on a child’s thigh bone, a forehead with an apparent bullet hole.

Three years after the discovery, by workers digging up the cloisters of a 17th-century Franciscan convent, forensic specialists and historians say they have solved the mystery.

They say the estimated 3,000 dead in the grave were victims of the earthquake that devastated Lisbon in 1755, and that this is the first mass grave of its kind ever found in the Portuguese capital.

“You didn’t have to be a genius to work it out. The evidence is overwhelming,” says Miguel Telles Antunes, curator of the Academy of Sciences Museum who coordinated the investigation. “This could only have been some singular, calamitous event.”

The quake, which included a tsunami and a fire that raged for six days, was one of the deadliest catastrophes ever to hit Western Europe. It is thought to have killed as many as 60,000 people, and it destroyed much of the wealthy and elegant capital of a Portuguese empire stretching across Asia, Africa and Latin America.

Historians had a rough picture of what happened on Nov. 1, 1755, but detailed accounts were scarce. Now the mass grave presents a vivid and gruesome tableau of the past.

“We had clues about what occurred. Now we have the proof,” Mr. Telles Antunes said.

The thick-walled convent, parts of which survived the quake, now houses the Academy of Sciences, which distributed the remains among forensic scientists in several fields. Those sleuths, using the latest technology in a kind of “CSI: Lisbon,” gradually reconstructed events.

The mass grave held not just human remains but animal and fish bones, bits of pottery and ceramics, clay pipes, buttons, medallions, rosaries and even a thimble. All predated the quake.

Historians knew from public records that authorities hastily buried the dead to prevent an epidemic, but they didn’t know where. The grave shows just how pressured they were.

“When they gathered up the bodies to cart them away, they also scooped up bits of whatever else was lying around,” says Joao Luis Cardoso, a professor of archaeology at the Open University in Lisbon who oversaw the dig.

Cristiana Pereira, a forensic dentist at Lisbon University, was given 1,099 teeth from the grave.

Using the same procedures employed to identify victims in mass graves in the former Yugoslavia and from the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, she classified 79 victims, including babies.

The largest age group was 17 to 35, leading her to conclude the city had a young population. The teeth also showed few signs of decay, in part, presumably, because few people could afford the sugar imported from Portuguese colonial plantations in Africa and Brazil.

“It’s all helping to fill in the blanks,” she said.

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