Exhuming a violent event
Scientists glean clues to a lethal prehistoric raid from skeletons excavated at a German site
By Bruce Bower
Thirteen people who perished around 4,600 years ago still have something to say about life and death in prehistoric Europe.
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Analyses of their skeletal remains, found in 2005 in four large graves at a German Neolithic-era site called Eulau, provide a rare opportunity to reconstruct a lethal encounter from Europe’s Corded Ware culture, say anthropologist Christian Meyer of the University of Mainz in Germany and his colleagues. Between about 4,800 and 4,000 years ago, Corded Ware farmers and cattle-raisers spread across central and eastern Europe.
Reconstruction of the events at Eulau also offers a rare peek into the motivation for putting two or more bodies in the same grave, the researchers report in a paper published online August 15 in the Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. Little is known about several dozen similar Corded Ware graves that have been excavated.