In the middle of a field next to Charterhouse Warren farm, in the county of Somerset, 200 km west of London, a small, disorganized group of trees catches the eye. This strange spot of weeds in the middle of the green fields hides the dark entrance to a narrow chasm one meter wide by fifteen meters deep where, in the 1970s, local speleologists found more than 3,000 bones belonging to at least 37 people who lived 4,000 years ago. The story gets even more gruesome as you delve deeper into the past. Because five decades later and after being dusted off from the archive of a nearby museum, the remains now reveal a harsh reality of extreme violence and even cannibalism in the Bronze Age. Not only that: it is the largest prehistoric massacre in Britain on record in which, everything seems to indicate, an entire people, including women and children, was exterminated. The study, in which Spanish researchers participate, has just been published in the journal ‘Antiquity’. In most of the skulls found, marks had been found that already indicated that the death of those people had not occurred naturally. The new study, which began in late 2017, has found even more evidence of perimortem fractures and bruises (that is, caused around the time of death); However, there is no evidence of defense marks, so the authors think the victims were caught by surprise. And the event does not end there. “Not only did they kill them, but they processed their remains,” Javier Ordoño, archaeologist, founding partner of Arkikus and one of the authors of the work together with Teresa Fernández-Crespo, researcher at the University of Valladolid, explains to ABC. “And, at least in part, they were consumed,” he continues. A meticulous butcher’s job Because, as if they were expert butchers, signs of cuts made with flint tools have been evident on the bone, indicating that someone skinned, dismembered and disarticulated the bodies of the victims, as well as intentional fractures of the long bones, surely to extract the marrow from them, and numerous cuts inside the ribs, as a sign that the victims organs were extracted in this macabre ritual; Evidence of cooking was even found, as well as marks of human teeth on small bones, such as the phalanges. “Such a meticulous (and so macabre) work, on so many individuals, had to take up not a few hours, but days, in addition to implying a knowledge of human anatomy similar to that of a surgeon,” says Ordoño. Furthermore, experts estimate that the site is only excavated at 50% of its potential, so the number of victims could be doubled. Curiously, it so happens that at the paleolithic site of Gough’s Cave, in Cheddar Gorge, separated by just a couple of kilometers, evidence of cannibalism has also been found. “But that happened about 14,000 years ago, ten millennia before all this, and probably for completely different reasons,” says the archaeologist. The authors, who also include researchers from the University of Oxford and the Free University of Brussels, They think that in the Charterhouse Warren case neither environmental nor ethnic factors were behind the tensions that resulted in the massacre. “The climatic and genetic evidence does not correspond to either of these two scenarios,” says Ordoño. Nor with a fight for resources, since the area is not especially rich in mining (which in the Bronze Age could be crucial) nor are its fields especially fertile. “Those people lived mainly from livestock, so it is possible that something related to a robbery could be the germ of a violence on a scale that ended with the eradication of an entire town.” In addition, the bones studied were thrown into the depths from the chasm along with remains of other animals (mainly remains of cows, sheep and pigs have been found, but also some deer). “This would further strip them of their humanity,” explains the archaeologist. What’s more: the marks we found on the bones of the human victims showed more systematic processing than those shown by the remains of animals.” The most plausible hypothesis for the authors is that a rival prehistoric people, probably neighbors of the massacred, carried out an act of revenge with disproportionately violent actions, perhaps due to a previous offense (a robbery, an insult or attack on a member of the opposing community, etc.), the most common detonator of violence in pre-state societies, as documented ethnographically. The result: “A large-scale massacre followed by a ritual of dehumanization that would surely have a great echo in the region.” And then the plague arrived. There is still one more peculiarity at this site: the first results of genetic analysis, still in progress , have revealed that at least two of the members of that group, two children aged 10 and 12, were infected with the bacteria Yersinia pestis, the agent that causes plague. “This is the first case of plague in Great Britain,” says Ordoño, who explains that this finding was published last year in the journal ‘Nature Communications’. «Whether this had anything to do with social tension is almost impossible to know, but it could have been a triggering factor. More intriguing if possible is to think about the ritual and symbolic reasons that led a population to manipulate and cannibalize individuals infected by the plague…” MORE INFORMATION news Yes The largest crater on the Moon was not formed as scientists believed news No When and how we mate: this is how we receive our Neanderthal heritageThis and other challenges are those that researchers face from now on, who still hope to obtain more information from the more than 3,000 bones found in Charterhouse Warren, from the possible kinship relationships between the victims to their diet and isotopic biographies, or even the way in which some bones were apparently cooked. “Although at the moment there are no plans to continue excavating, all the material recovered can still reveal many surprises,” says Ordoño. “Without a doubt, we are facing a unique site.”
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