One of the special pleasures in any medieval game is getting to field a trebuchet. In an era where warfare was largely a contest of who can keep people swinging their unfriendliest sticks around the longest before they get hungry enough to leave, there's a sort of giddiness that comes with being the guy who's weaponized the higher art of applied physics to fling half-ton boulders better than any run-of-the-mill onager could ever hope to.
Sadly, there have in fact been real human beings who were unfortunate enough to be in the way of those boulders over the years, and as reported earlier this week by Science, researchers have identified a skeleton they believe could very well be the first confirmed trebuchet casualty in the archaeological record.
English (US)