Grisly remains point to a desolate, ancient chapter in British history

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Thousands of ancient butchered human bones found in a deep shaft in southwest England have pointed archaeologists to a dark chapter in British prehistory that took place in the early Bronze Age.

Analysis of the more than 3,000 bones revealed that unknown attackers arrived between 2210 and 2010 B.C. At a place called Charterhouse Warren in Somerset in 150 BC, at least 37 men, women and children were violently killed before slaughtering and cannibalizing their victims. The attackers then threw the remains of the bodies into a 15-meter-long natural shaft connected to a cave system.

The grisly find represents the largest example of interpersonal violence from the period in Britain, according to the authors of a study describing the findings, published Sunday in the journal Antiquity.

The bones are rare, direct evidence pointing to a cycle of violence during a period during the Early Bronze Age that experts had once considered largely peaceful in Britain. Most of the hundreds of human skeletons found between 2500 and 1500 B.C. Recovered in the country in the 1st century BC typically contained no evidence of brutality, the study authors said.

“We actually find more evidence of injuries on skeletons from the Neolithic period (10,000 to 2,200 BC) in Britain than from the early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual,” said lead study author Rick Schulting, Professor of scientific and prehistoric archeology at the University of Oxford, in a statement.
“It paints a much darker picture of the times than many would have expected.”

Researchers believe the intention behind the extreme treatment of the victims’ remains was to dehumanize them as revenge for a supposedly serious crime. However, it is proving difficult to determine the exact motive of unknown attackers from a time when there were no written documents in the region.

Uncovering a terrible website

In the 1970s and 1980s, excavations took place at the Charterhouse Warren shaft, which is part of a limestone plateau, to better understand the underground cave system. There, researchers discovered piles of buried human bones mixed with cattle bones that told the story of mass violence in an ancient community.

Since its discovery, several studies have examined the site and its contents. But the find caught Schulting’s attention in 2016 thanks to his colleague and co-author of the study, Dr. Louise Loe, Head of Heritage Burial Services at Oxford Archaeology, which excavates and analyzes human skeletons from archaeological sites. Loe had examined the remains and knew that Schulting was interested in documenting evidence of prehistoric violence.

“We examined some of the material together and it quickly became clear that the extent of the changes to the bones went far beyond what any of us had ever seen,” said Schulting. “So the project came about to tell the story of the place.”

An analysis of the bones revealed that many of the skulls had suffered fatal blunt force injuries, but the violence did not end there. Numerous cuts on the bones and fractures at or shortly before death showed that the victims’ heads, arms, feet and legs had been severed from their bodies using stone tools. There was also evidence that their scalps and skin had been removed, as well as some heads that had their lower jaws and possibly tongues removed.

“In addition, some small bones of the hands and feet exhibit fresh, bone-breaking fractures consistent with the flat molars of omnivores, including humans, rather than the sharper punctures caused by carnivores,” the authors write in the study. It was noted that the body parts were quickly buried after slaughter and cannibalization, making scavenging by animals highly unlikely.

Bone analysis also showed that almost all of the victims were local, suggesting that the attackers entered the community to carry out their brutal acts. Furthermore, the extreme way in which the remains were handled goes beyond what Schulting and his colleagues have seen on remains of previously slaughtered animals.

“The most surprising thing is the sheer scale of the slaughter of the bodies,” Schulting said. “They were killed by blows to the head and then systematically dismembered, fleshed and boned.”

Researchers believe the bones all come from a single event. However, given that there are different layers of material in the shaft, the animal and human remains inside could have been deposited “over decades and up to a century or so,” the study says.

“The location itself can be the common denominator; The natural shaft and the large cave system underneath invite comparison with a portal to the underworld,” write the authors of the study.

But the biggest question is why this community was brutalized in the first place. To find out why, the team looked back at similar violent events over time.

A history of violence

For context, the researchers looked at the nearby Paleolithic site of Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, just 3 kilometers to the west. Previous excavations there discovered six people whose bones had been dismembered and butchered, including possible human chewing marks on hand, foot and rib bones. However, there is no evidence that the people who cannibalized them actually killed their victims, suggesting that the cannibalism was actually a form of burial ritual, the study authors said.

Researchers have found evidence of bow-and-arrow warfare at Bronze Age sites, and there is evidence from the early Neolithic period about 1,500 years before Charterhouse, when weapons such as swords appeared in the historical record, Schulting said.

But the victims at Charterhouse Warren showed no signs of fighting back, suggesting that a significant proportion of a community were taken by surprise or held captive and massacred, and that the way they were treated afterwards was markedly different from ritual .

According to the study’s authors, there are only a few examples of victims of violence being buried, such as a young man who was found in a ditch at Stonehenge and shot multiple times with arrows. However, burial rituals largely included cremation or burial of several people together rather than what was found at Charterhouse Warren.

Given the large amount of cattle bones mixed in with the human bones, researchers do not believe the people were killed due to starvation.

Instead, the study authors believe cannibalism may have been an extreme form of dehumanization of victims by “othering” the deceased or eating their flesh and mixing their bones with cattle bones to compare the victims to animals, the researchers said.

Innovations in weapons such as daggers suggest interpersonal violence occurred at this time in early Bronze Age Britain, said Barry Molloy, associate professor at University College Dublin’s school of archeology. Enemies could be seen as “others, people who are so distant from your group that extreme violence against them becomes acceptable,” said Molloy, who was not involved in the study.

Population changes in Britain in the centuries surrounding the event suggest that extraordinary othering took place as new groups took over parts of Britain, Molloy said.

“The extent to which the people of prehistoric Europe were willing to dehumanize and brutalize the other enemy group is clear to (Charterhouse Warren),” he said.

But what could have led to such a dramatic act? The study’s authors do not believe the attackers were fighting for control of resources at the site, and climate change did not appear to have an impact on the conflict in Britain at the time.

While it is impossible to determine the ancestry of the attackers, there is no evidence to suggest a clash between communities of different ancestry or ethnicity.

An extreme form of revenge

Understanding motivations in prehistory before written records existed in Britain was incredibly challenging, Schulting said. But the sheer number of victims means there must have been an even larger number of attackers, he said.

Analysis of DNA from the bones is underway to determine how closely related the victims are, and the research team intends to examine the animal bones in the future, Schulting said.

And there is evidence in the teeth of two of the child victims that they had contracted the plague, based on previous research, although it is unclear how this may have been linked to the violent episode.

“This may have been viewed as revenge for a transgression,” Schulting said. “Such acts of violence can arise in a climate of anger and fear – there is evidence that some people had contracted the plague, which may have contributed to a sense of fear and insecurity. Tensions may have built up from relatively innocuous beginnings (theft, accusations of witchcraft, etc.) and then spiraled out of control.”

Molloy said that while the theory of a single massacre is compelling, it is even more frightening when one considers that this phenomenon has occurred in multiple cases and may have normalized cannibalism.

“Sometimes a single location can radically change our perception, and I think Charterhouse has the potential to do just that,” Schulting said. “The extreme violence observed here is unlikely to have been an isolated incident. It would have had an impact as the victims’ families and friends would have sought revenge and this could have led to cycles of violence in the region.”

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