The Bishop of Lund Peder Pedersen Winstrup, of the Churches of Sweden and Denmark, died in 1679. An important and respected man, his body was mummified and buried in a family vault in Lund Cathedral. Apart from the exceptional preservation of his remains, nothing seemed unusual in his death or burial.
In 2012, when the decision was made to move Winstrup's coffin, scientists took the opportunity to study his remains.
That's when they found it: the tiny corpse of a fetus, stillborn no more than five or six months pregnant, carefully hidden behind and between the bishop's calves.
Finding a fetus or baby with the remains of a woman, usually presumed to be the mother, is not unusual in archaeology.
The corpse of the bishop with the fetus (Krzewinska et al., J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep., 2021).
Records show that the children's remains were also buried in Lund Cathedral, sometimes even unrelated to the other bodies with which they were placed, as the tomb was sometimes used as a temporary storage of remains.
But placed in a bishop's coffin? An important bishop who died at the respectable age of 74? And not just placed, but hidden in the lining of the coffin, as if it had been hurriedly and secretly put away? This was a puzzle that archaeologists had to solve.
"It was not uncommon for young children to be placed in coffins with adults. The fetus may have been placed in the coffin after the funeral, when it was in a vaulted tomb in Lund Cathedral and therefore accessible," said archaeologist Torbjörn Ahlström of Lund University in Sweden.
"Placing a coffin in a vault is one thing, but placing the fetus in the bishop's coffin is quite another. It made us wonder if there was any relationship between the boy and the bishop."
NOW THE TRUTH IS KNOWN
The team sampled both sets of remains and performed complete genetic sequences of the extracted DNA.
The corpse of the bishop with the fetus (Krzewinska et al., J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep., 2021).
There was the answer. About 25 percent of their genes matched. This indicates a secondary relationship between the two, such as that between an uncle and nephew, half-siblings, double cousins or, much more likely given the relative ages of the remains, a grandparent and grandson.
This is also supported by chromosomal evidence. Winstrup and the fetus do not share mitochondrial DNA, which is passed down from the mother; this means that the mother was not Winstrup's daughter. In addition, the two corpses shared a Y chromosome, which can only be passed on from the father.
This suggests that the boy's father was Winstrup's son. From the bishop's first marriage, he had a son who survived to adulthood, also named Peder Pedersen Winstrup.
The arrow points to the fetus (Krzewinska et al., J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep., 2021).
According to historical records, the young Winstrup studied fortification, rather than theology, when he attended Leiden University in the Netherlands as a young man. He married no later than 1679 a young noblewoman named Dorothea Sparre, who brought with her Södertou, the property of her late father.
In 1680, during the Great Reduction, in which the Swedish crown recovered the lands donated to the aristocracy, Winstrup the Younger lost his estates, including the Lundagård estate of Winstrup the elder. He spent the rest of his life destitute, never fathering a child; the male lineage died with him sometime in the early eighteenth century.
The fetus, therefore, appears to be a part of the man's sad story, perhaps placed in his father's coffin as a symbolic act, said the researchers, Winstrup's last male heir buried with his grandfather.
X-rays show the contents of the coffin (Krzewinska et al., J. Archaeol. Sci. Rep., 2021).
"With the results of DNA analysis and genealogy, the only person able to provide a second-degree relative to Peder Winstrup through paternal lineage was his son, Peder. The fetus of a child placed in the coffin could thus be the grandson of the bishop," the researchers wrote in their paper.
"It seems likely that the relatives had access to the crypt where the coffins of the Winstrup's were kept and, therefore, the possibility of depositing the fetus in one of the coffins, in this case that of Peder Winstrup."
It is possible that someone wanted to make sure that the child who had missed the experience of life would at least be with his family in death.
Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports and Science Alert.
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