Bones from an Iron Age massacre paint a violent picture of prehistoric Europe
Unburied victims and abandoned jewelry suggest a power struggle rather than plunder
Attacked from behind and at times dismembered, the fallen residents of an ancient Iberian village add to evidence that prehistoric Europe was a violent place.
Violence in ancient Europe isn’t unheard of, with some unearthed massacres attributed to power struggles after the fall of the Roman Empire around 1,500 years ago (SN: 4/25/18). But a new analysis of bones from 13 victims suggests that a violent massacre occurred at a site in what’s now Spain centuries before the Romans arrived, researchers report October 1 in Antiquity.
Finding “partially burnt skeletons and scattered human bones with unhealed injuries caused by sharp weapons demonstrated that this was an extremely violent event,” says archaeologist Javier Ordoño Daubagna of Arkikus, an archaeological research company in Vitoria-Gasteiz, Spain.
Ordoño Daubagna and colleagues examined nine adults, two adolescents, a young child and one infant who died sometime between 365 and 195 B.C., in the ancient village of La Hoya. One of the adults was decapitated in a single blow, the team found. And one of the adolescents, a female, had her arm cut off. The researchers found the arm bones nearly three meters away from the girl’s skeleton, with five copper-alloy bracelets still attached.