Sandby borg is an Iron Age ringfort, in Sweden, that was the scene of a massacre in the 5th century CE. The victims of the massacre discovered so far, all males, were never buried but are found lying as they fell. 5 deposits of exquisite jewelry were also discovered hidden in the fort [3990×8718]

Too bad the wiki doesn’t provide more interpretation options. Do you know what working hypotheses about this exist?

Anachronistically, my brain directly jumps to some sort of raid scenario where the/some men were killed and the women and the male survivors taken to some other place, leaving the site uninhabited – hence the bodies remained unburied. Because … that’s what vikings did. But as said, anachronistic and just the first thought.
I’d be super interested in any kind of hypotheses for this 🙂

If I remember correctly, some of the victims had Roman coins placed in their eyesockets to mock them. Might be that this folk had been working as mercenaries for the Romans and were exterminated as vengeance for it? Or at least their past ties to the Romans were used to defile their corpses by the invaders. A detail of significance.

I think I also remember reading that the invaders had not taken any livestock with them as they left. Instead the animals were killed too in their stalls. This would speak against any local people/chieftains being behind the attack. The invaders instead came from beyond the sea somewhere to specifically target this place, snuck in under the cover of darkness, slew everyone & everything and then left with just what they could carry on their backs. 

The local people shunning the place afterwards for a millennium and a half also speaks against the locals being behind this attack. It was a nice, ready, fortified place. Why not just take it over if these were your rivals? The locals instead just discovered the aftermath of absolute carnage and slaughter with no perpetrators in sight. Might be there was not a single survivor to explain what had happened, so they were even more horrified and the place became taboo, believed to be haunted by the ghosts of the dead.