Medieval crime? Lakes and rivers sometimes act as more than fun places to pass a hot day, dipping in and out of cool water to ease the discomfort of a blazing summer sun. They’ve been known to function as crime scenes and graves, too.

Sometimes criminals dump their victims into deep waters to hide the evidence, so to speak. After all, unless law enforcement officials know where to look, seldom do divers explore an area’s waters just on a hunch bodies might lay on the bottom.

For that reason, a lake can make an excellent cover for a bad guy looking to dispose of his victim.

Lakes and rivers are also the places where literally hundreds of thousands of soldiers, perhaps millions of them who participated in the wars that have occurred globally over many generations, have fallen after battle.

In World War II alone, the number of soldiers who slipped beneath the surface of oceans, rivers and lakes across Europe is almost inconceivable; they died and fell into the murky depths, their bodies never recovered.

That was the fate of a medieval soldier whose remains were recently discovered in a lake in Lithuania. Experts know he was a soldier because two knives and a sword were found near the body, all of which were amazingly well preserved, said the archaeologists and divers involved in the retrieval.

While my field was human paleohistory, as a former Archaeology student, I love this stuff.

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