Trebechet Terminal Ballistics

From an article published by Smithsonian Magazine entitled, "A Medieval Man’s Injuries Reminded One Archaeologist of Modern-Day Car Crash Victims. They Turned Out to Be the Work of an English Trebuchet":

    As Jo Buckberry, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Bradford in England, announced at a recent meeting of the Paleopathology Association, a skeleton excavated at the Scottish castle bears more than 160 fractures sustained at or around the time of death, with most of the injuries concentrated on the skull and the ribs. Buckberry argues that the man’s remains represent the first known evidence of trebuchet trauma in the archaeological record.

    “It looks like he was hit from behind by something traveling at a great velocity,” Buckberry tells Science magazine’s Andrew Curry. “The most similar cases I was finding were car crashes and people hit by trains. But how do you get from there to a guy in medieval Scotland? What is large and moving very, very quickly in 1304?”

    The answer, Buckberry concluded after comparing the man’s injuries to other documented cases, was probably a large stone that struck his right shoulder and the back of his head with great force, pinning him to the ground. “The scale of the fractures of his body suggest his death was thankfully instantaneous,” the researcher says to the Daily Mail’s William Hunter.