New research suggests that dozens of Bronze Age Britons were killed in an attack unlike any previously known to archaeologists studying that time period and location.
The study of human remains from Charterhouse Warren in south-west England, carried out by a team of researchers from multiple institutions including the University of Oxford, was published in Antiquity, a journal of world archaeology. It found that at least 37 Bronze Age men, women and children were “killed and butchered” and then cannibalized, with their bodies then thrown into a nearly 50-foot-deep natural shaft. Although archaeologists have found remains of Bronze Age and later Britons who died violently, these incidents were largely isolated. Mass graves from this era have also been found, but the remains were buried respectfully, unlike those studied.
Researchers first became aware of the shaft in the 1970s. Two excavations were carried out in the 1970s and 1980s. The human remains, as well as some artifacts, including a flint dagger, were found in several places in the shaft during these excavations. In total, more than 3,000 individual human bones and bone fragments have been recovered. Those bones were used to estimate that there were at least 37 individual sets of remains in the shaft. Varying bone lengths show that the people killed were both men and women, and ranged in age from infants to fully grown adults. Research is ongoing to determine how the people were related to each other.
The way the remains were removed made the detailed investigation possible, the researchers said. The shaft helped preserve the bones and hold them together.
Bones showing damage attributed to possible human chewing. / Credit: Cambridge University Press on behalf of Antiquity Publications Ltd
The bones “show clear evidence of blunt force trauma,” researchers said, suggesting that many of the people in the shaft “suffered a violent death.” Other injuries, including the removal of the scalp and severed muscles in the jaw indicative of removal of the tongue or lower jaw, also likely occurred, as evidenced by stains on the bones, the researchers said. Some victims may have been decapitated or dismembered.
It is possible that the victims were held captive or ambushed due to the severity of the injuries, investigators said. It is not clear who could have carried out the attacks.
There is also evidence that the bodies were cannibalized, the researchers said, including human tooth marks on the bones and evidence that marrow, the soft tissue in the bones, was removed. The researchers said the cannibalism likely occurred “in the context of a violent conflict, in which individuals are dehumanized and treated like animals.”
“Some 37 men, women and children – and possibly many more – were killed at close range with blunt instruments and then systematically dismembered and defleshed, their long bones broken in a manner that can only be described as slaughter,” he said. the researchers.
Later in the publication, researchers called the scene a “massacre” and suggested it might even have been a “political statement” of violence so brutal that it “would have resonated across the wider region and over time.” However, it is not clear what could have led to the violence: “Neither climate change, ethnic conflict, nor competition for material resources appear to offer convincing explanations,” the researchers said, leaving the only likely option that the violence broke out as part of a pattern of revenge or violence between communities.
“At this stage, our investigation has raised as many questions as it has answered,” the researchers said. “Work is underway to shed more light on this decidedly dark episode in British prehistory.”
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