Two years after an extraordinary discovery, the first burial found in the Real Alcázar in Seville, which contained the remains of a blonde girl aged four to five, the results of the archaeological survey dismantle the original hypotheses that suggested the little Girl lived in the Middle Ages. The scientific opinion presented on Thursday in the Andalusian capital has established that it is a case of a minor born in the last third of the 19th century. But what may seem disappointing at first glance is an archaeological find as valuable as a historical find.
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The research could well become a novel and should be told at least chronologically as such. April 2021: The team of archaeologists conducting the tastings before the project to consolidate the 15th-century tiles in the Gothic palace of the Real Alcázar in Seville, finds 20 centimeters from the current floor the body of a girl with locks of blond hair still on skull, between four and five years old. The news is widely disseminated due to its importance: it is the first human burial found in the 10-century history of the monumental complex of Seville, a small lead sarcophagus inside which a wooden coffin almost decomposed by damp and a skeleton with textile were found were remnants, shoe leather and two mother-of-pearl buttons. The hypothesis that the team around Miguel Ángel Tabales, professor at the University of Seville and director of archaeological activities in the Alcázar, is starting to work with is that he lived in the Late Middle Ages, between the end of the 13th 14th and 18th centuries.
The finding was so extraordinary that a research team composed of geneticists from the Department of Forensic Medicine of the University of Granada and experts in forensic genetics from Santiago de Compostela, members of the university’s molecular laboratory, was recruited for its study. by A Coruña, the National Accelerator Center and the Andalusian Institute of Geophysics. “The best in Spain,” says Tabales.
Part of the skeletal remains of the girl’s body, found in the Alcázar in April 2021, was presented this Thursday at Sevilla.AB
February 2023: The team completes the investigation with results that differ radically from the original hypotheses. The three radiocarbon dates on the human remains, the shoes and the coffin consistently indicate that the girl was born in the second half of the 19th century, when Isabel II reigned.
The dating might have led to disappointment, but the completeness of the scientific study has added a plus of interest and amazement to the story. “It’s probably a secret, at least semi-secret burial” that was placed under the main altar of the chapel at the feet of the Virgen de la Antigua, “probably because of the devotion to the image,” says Tabales.
a very powerful family
But who had access to the Gothic chapel of the Alcázar back then? It must be remembered that the palace complex, which has been declared a World Heritage Site, was the exclusive property of the Spanish Royal House – with no public access or open to visits at a time when tourism did not yet exist – until 1931, the government of the Second The Republic left it, along with its gardens, to the Seville City Council. “The place where the remains were found makes it extraordinary: it must have been, without a doubt, a very powerful family, with enormous influence on access to the enclosure”, and with a great deal of strength to raise the floor of the chapel and place it the coffin right under the altar and the image of the Virgin, says the archaeologist. “The chosen location and the quality of the sarcophagus are incompatible with a covert action by the Alcázar staff of the time,” who presumably also followed orders and remained silent, as the scientific team recognized.
Courtyard of the Virgins of the Alcazar of Seville.PACO PUENTES
But even more, the report adds another revealing fact: Examining her diet through paleo diet techniques reveals that she was particularly good, “amazingly high in protein,” which was utterly rare at the time. “She was an observant girl who was placed in a family for a very long time,” dares the archaeologist to claim. There is more astonishing evidence – the buttons found, the material on the soles of her shoes – that point to a more than comfortable origin of the deceased girl, in a city then more than dominated by aristocratic elites, with the upper bourgeoisie and controlled by Antonio de Orleans and María Luisa Fernanda, Dukes of Montpensier, based in Seville since 1848, where they initially stayed precisely in the city’s Alcázar, until being definitively transferred to the San Telmo Palace.
However, the multidisciplinary scientific team led by archaeologist Miguel Ángel Tabales has studied all the royal burials, including those of the bastard children; They have consulted the bibliography and searched files related to the families who lived in the Alcázar in those years, but at the moment they have not found any connection to the skeletal remains of the girl found in the Gothic palace.
The big obstacle to “giving the body a first and last name” was the DNA test, which was negative due to the circumstances of the burial: “We fought with the DNA for two years, we have the analyzes in Granada repeatedly and in A Coruña, with the best specialists in Spain,” the archaeologist clarifies, but nothing could be done because of the ravages of lead, lime and water.
“In any case, it’s not a disappointment, emotionally it was much more gratifying,” says Tabales, who attributes the cause of death to an intracranial cardiovascular malformation, “a rare disease about which little is known in the medical literature.” The work is still open, “albeit with few prospects,” admits the archaeologist. The fate of the corpse will be to return it to the place where it was found: “Bury it with dignity, out of respect for this decision.”
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