If this conclusion is correct, we know a great deal about this trench. It was dug by the troops under the command of General Cos between October 12 and November 3, 1835, as part of a major attempt to fortify the Alamo before the arrival of the Texan army. The trench stood open through the winter until the Battle of the Alamo, February 23 to March 6, 1836. From March 6 until May 22, the Alamo was in the hands of General Andrade of the Mexican army, who repaired the defenses and undoubtedly cleaned out the debris left in the ditches from the battle. On May 22, upon receiving orders to abandon San Antonio and destroy the defenses of the Alamo, Andrade knocked down the single walls and filled the trenches. While doing this, his troops threw the skull we found into the ditch along with the wall and its associated embankments.
This in itself does not make the skull the remains of a participant in the Battle of the Alamo. It could easily have belonged to someone who was buried in the area at some time in the past, excavated along with the other contents of the defensive trench, heaped against the courtyard wall (see below, "The Defenses of the North Courtyard"), and reinterred when this and the embankments were dumped back into the ditch. The condition of the skull itself, however, argues against this.
The skull (Figure 16) is identified as the cranium of a young individual, probably male, of unknown biological affinity, who died between the ages of 15 and 25. Four cuts in the skull may have resulted from a knife or saber wound, or may have been of post-depositional origin (Glassman and Steele, Appendix B). Although the facial portion of the skull is gone, the two delicate bones of the bridge of the nose survive. No other skeletal remains were found.
The condition of the cranium argues quite strongly in favor of the following sequence of events. After the death of this individual, his body lay undisturbed for a period of two to four months, until the flesh of the body was largely gone, but the bone was still strong and solid, and the major cartilage structures, such as that of the nose, still survived to some extent. This would have taken at least four months under normal circumstances, but if the weather was warm and humid the time would have been shortened by a month or more. A serious wound on the face of the individual would also shorten the time. We know from Mary Maverick (Green 1952:70) that the spring of 1836 was at least moderately wet.
At this point the body was disturbed, and the skull was mishandled with sufficient force that it disarticulated at what was then its weakest points: where the bones of the face join the bones of the cranium. Several skulls in the CAR collection exhibit this separation, with one important difference. The two small bones of the nose rarely if ever survive such a break. There is only a short period in the sequence of a body's decay when the facial bones will break off but the nasal bones, protected by the remains of the nasal cartilage, will remain with the cranium.
The skull, then, may have belonged to someone who died immediately after being slashed several times by a heavy-bladed weapon a few months before his skull was dumped into a defensive ditch of the Alamo on May 22. From February 23 through March 6, two and a half to three months before that date, a large number of young men of this same age all died violent deaths, many of them the victims of, among other things, heavy-bladed weapons. It would be, we think, an extreme improbability for these two occurrences to have been without connection. As far as we can tell, the skull is that of a participant in the Battle of the Alamo.