A pit of human skeletons found in Somerset shows evidence of a brutal massacre and cannibalism, according to a new study.
A recent analysis of more than 3,000 bones recovered from Charterhouse Warren, excavated originally in the 1970s, has uncovered what academics described as “the darker side of human prehistory”.
Around 37 men, women and children, and likely “many more”, were killed at close quarters and then “systematically dismembered and defleshed”.
At least some were then eaten.
Bones showing damage suspected to be from human chewing.
Pic: Antiquity Publications Ltd/Cambridge University Press
‘A violent death’
The remains, of which around half are “older children and adolescents”, are noted among academics for the “sheer number of cutmarks on the bones”.
The skeletons were dumped in a 15m deep hole, where they were found a millennia later.
The work is the first major scientific study of the bones and it found that skulls were shattered by blows and arms and legs were “defleshed” and cut away to let people get at bone marrow inside.
There is also evidence of people being scalped, tongues being cut out, chest cavities cut open, arms and feet severed, decapitation, and more.
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The findings are a unique example of extreme violence in British prehistory – with relatively little evidence of such acts surviving.
It is believed the violence took place “probably in a single event between” 2210BC and 2010BC.
But the bloody incident may have “been part of a spiralling cycle of revenge” within or between Early Bronze Age communities, the study said, and as such may have had antecedent events and violent consequences.
The jaw of a child, aged around ten, with cut marks.
Pic: Antiquity Publications Ltd/Cambridge University Press
The study, published in Antiquity, said: “The human bone assemblage from Horizon 2 at Charterhouse Warren is clearly exceptional, both in terms of the number of violent deaths – evidence for which is otherwise rare in the British Early Bronze Age – and in the extensive and systematic processing of the bodies, previously unknown for this period.
“Some 37 men, women and children – and possibly many more – were killed at close quarters with blunt instruments and then systematically dismembered and defleshed, their long bones fractured in a way that can only be described as butchery.”
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