Horse in the grave too

Loving couple turned into dead mother and daughter

Mother and daughter were buried together in Wels - along with a horse(Bild: Stadtmuseum Wels)

It is a small sensation and the solution to a mystery, but one question still remains in Wels: Why is there a horse in a grave? Originally it was assumed that a couple and their horse were buried here in the Middle Ages, but now it is clear: it is a mother and daughter.

"In 2004, an unusual grave was discovered during construction work in the area of the so-called eastern burial grounds of the ancient Roman city of Ovilava - today's Wels," say Sylvia Kirchengast and Dominik Hagmann from the Human Evolution and Archaeological Sciences (HEAS) research network at the University of Vienna, who investigated the case in more detail: "The grave contained the remains of two people embracing and a horse." It was initially believed to be the double burial of a married couple from the early Middle Ages.

The grave upon discovery - the horse lies beneath the two human skeletons(Bild: Stadtmuseum Wels)

But then they took a closer look at the remains and examined the bones, and genetic analysis was also possible. It turned out that there was no man in the grave, but two women. And the DNA analysis revealed that they were the mother and biological daughter.

Co-burial of horse unusual
The researchers also discovered that the grave is half a millennium older than assumed, i.e. from the Roman period and not the Middle Ages. "At that time, the co-burial of a horse was unusual," it says in the Journal of Archeological Science. It is assumed that the women probably died of an illness at the same time and that at least one of them enjoyed riding, which is why the horse was placed in the grave.

Daughter no older than 25
The mother was 40 to 60 years old at the time of death, her daughter 20 to 25 years old. According to the age determination of the skeletons using the radiocarbon dating method, they lived in the second to third century. This makes it the first recorded mother-daughter burial from the Roman period in what is now Austria.