Nearly 80 men found shackled in an ancient Athens mass grave were locals

Shackled skeletons, PC: Athens Journal of History, 2021 In 2016, archaeologists digging at the Phaleron cemetery on the coast near Athens uncovered one of the most unsettling finds in Greek archaeology, a mass grave holding nearly 80 adult men, many still shackled at the wrists with iron restraints. The men, known as the Esplanada group, had been laid out in orderly rows and appeared to have died violently, sparking a decade of debate over who they were. Some researchers argued they were foreign fighters or mercenaries brought into Attica during a period of political turmoil, while others suspected they were victims of an early Athenian state exercising new powers of collective punishment. A fresh scientific study has now reexamined their remains using chemical analysis of tooth enamel, and the results overturn the outsider theory entirely, showing that the shackled men were almost certainly locals who grew up in the very region where they were later executed and buried.How researchers reexamined the Phaleron mass graveThe Esplanada mass grave forms part of the larger Phaleron burial ground, a cemetery in use from around the 8th to the 5th century BC that has yielded some of the ri...