Archaeologists excavating a 50-foot pit in Charterhouse Warren, England, unearthed over 3,000 bones showing signs of extreme violence. The findings suggest a massacre took place between 2210 B.C. and 2010 B.C., a unique event in Early Bronze Age Britain.
Over 3,000 bones were excavated from a 50-foot pit in Charterhouse Warren, around 20 miles south of the city of The bones, which were chosen for analysis because of the “sheer number of cutmarks,” were first discovered by cavers in the 1970s, researchers said.They had more violence inflicted on them then what would normally be seen'in a butchered animal bone assemblage,” Rick Schulting, the study's lead author, told NBC News in an email Monday.
Schulting, a professor of scientific and prehistoric archaeology at Britain's University of Oxford, said that the archeology at the site is “exceptional.” “The most surprising thing is the sheer extent of the violence carried out on the bodies,' he said.'They were killed with blows to the head, and then systematically dismembered, defleshed, bones smashed apart.'The violence took place “probably in a single event between” 2210 B.C. and 2010 B.C., researchers suggest, adding that it's a unique example of extreme violence in Early Bronze Age Britain and that'nothing else on this scale” has been recorded in Britain. Examples of cranial trauma on a Bronze Age skull recovered from Charterhouse Warren (Antiquity Publications Ltd / Cambridge University Press) However, Schulting said the extreme violence was unlikely to have been an isolated incident in the U.K. at the time. “There would have been repercussions, as the relatives and friends of the victims sought revenge, and this could have led to cycles of violence in the region,” he added. Schulting said that determining the motive behind such as an attack is “one of the hardest things to do in archaeology.” But together with his fellow authors, he concluded in the study that the massacre was likely driven by a furious “spiraling cycle of revenge” within or between Early Bronze Age communitie
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4,000-year-old bones reveal 'unprecedented' violence — tongue removal, cannibalism and evisceration in Bronze Age BritainKristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Killgrove holds postgraduate degrees in anthropology and classical archaeology and was formerly a university professor and researcher.
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