>> "European battlefields may have provided a convenient source of bone that could be ground down into bone-meal, an effective form of fertiliser. One of the main markets for this raw material was the British Isles.”<p>So quickly we forget. By weight, most of those bones would have been animal bones. Horses and mules were everywhere around armies until the middle of the 20th century. And, pre-refrigeration, armies did not move food around in boxes. It walked behind the army on hooves. The combination of dead horses/mules in combat, plus all the cattle being eaten, means that the vast majority of bones around a battle would not have been be human.