From 18 December 2024 to 31 August 2025, the Archaeological Museum Frankfurt will be showing the presentation ‘The Dark Side of Rome. The mass grave of Scupi’. The exhibition focuses on a remarkable archaeological find from a necropolis in the Roman city of Scupi, near modern-day Skopje in the Republic of North Macedonia: a mass grave that provides an insight into the darker side of the Roman Empire.Archaeologists discovered a trench there in 2011 that contained the mortal remains of around 200 people. The arrangement and condition of the skeletal remains suggest that they are the victims of a mass execution, possibly deserters or failed political opponents from the political crises of the 3rd and early 4th centuries. The mass grave sheds light on the merciless, cruel reality of Roman military policy. In an era characterised by internal conflicts and power struggles, soldiers who were on the wrong side were often punished mercilessly.
The exhibition presents the results of interdisciplinary analyses of the skeletons, which provide clear indications of the cause of death of the buried. The research results of forensic anthropology, which also investigates mass graves from current conflicts of the 20th and 21st centuries, provide answers to a variety of questions: about the number of buried individuals, their gender and age, their external appearance, their illnesses and injuries before death, their occupation and their origin. Numerous original finds from the mass grave and sculptural portrait reconstructions are on display.
The exhibition was realised in close cooperation with the Museum of the City of Skopje.
Image: View of the mass grave (Photo: Museum of the City of Skopje).