In a city whose written past was consumed by the fires of the First World War, the earth itself became the archive. Researchers at Vrije Universiteit Brussel have drawn meaning from over a thousand medieval skeletons unearthed beneath Ypres, reading in bone and isotope what no document survived to tell. Their findings quietly revise the story of a 13th-century metropolis: not a crossroads of distant wanderers, but a community largely rooted in its own soil — one where women moved through the world with more agency than history long assumed.