A mass grave in Britain containing over 3,000 bones reveals a horrifying scene of violence dating back to the Early Bronze Age. Researchers suggest the bones show signs of systematic dismemberment, defleshing, and crushing, indicating a brutal massacre likely driven by a cycle of revenge.
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
BRONZE AGE VIOLENCE BRITAIN MASSACRE CYCLES OF REVENGE
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