Even among our ancestors there were massacres and violent conflicts, this is nothing new. But in Slovakia, archaeologists have now discovered a Neolithic mass grave that puzzles them. The head is missing from the 38 skeletons that were randomly thrown into a settlement ditch around 7000 years ago. This is unique for the Neolithic period, the team explains. Why the dead were beheaded remains a mystery for the time being.
The Vráble-Ve`lke Lehemby site in Slovakia was one of the largest settlement sites in Central Europe in the early Neolithic period. In the period from 5250 to 4950 BC people of the Linear Pottery Culture lived here in three larger settlements with a total of at least 313 houses. Up to 80 houses were inhabited at the same time - for that time this was an exceptionally high population density. The south-west of the three settlements was also surrounded by a double ditch and thus distinguished itself from the others. Archaeologists from the Christian-Albrechts-Universität zu Kiel (CAU) and the Archaeological Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences found out that some areas of this ditch were also reinforced with palisades.
Headless skeletons in the ditch
Another unique selling point of Vráble-Ve`lke Lehemby has already emerged in the excavation campaigns of the past few years: In the Neolithic settlement area there were not only regular graves with grave goods on the outskirts of the settlement and next to the houses, the archaeologists also discovered some skeletons and partial skeletons in the settlement ditch. When the research teams continued their excavations in this area in the summer of 2022, they made an even more unusual discovery: "We expected more human skeletons, but this exceeded all our expectations," reports project leader Martin Furholt from the University of Kiel.
The archaeologists found 38 bodies in the ditch of the south-western settlement, whose bones were spread over an area of about 15 square meters. The skeletons lay haphazardly one on top of the other, side by side, stretched out on their stomachs, crouched on their sides, on their backs with their limbs spread out. Apparently, these dead were not carefully buried, but simply thrown or rolled into the ditch. The strangest thing, however, was that, with the exception of one small child, all the dead were headless - their skulls were nowhere to be found in this mass grave. For the Neolithic such skullless dead are something completely new. "This find is absolutely unique for the European Neolithic," says Furholt's colleague Maria Wunderlich.
Human sacrifice, war or bounty hunters?
What is behind this mass grave and in what context these people died is still unclear. "Some skeletons retain the first cervical vertebra, indicating careful dissection of the head rather than decapitation in a violent, ruthless sense - but these are all very preliminary observations that need to be confirmed by further investigation," reports Furholt. It is also unclear whether all the victims died at the same time or one after the other. "Several individual bones without a skeletal structure suggest that the chronological sequence could have been more complex," explains anthropologist Katharina Fuchs from the University of Kiel.
What motives people had for removing the skulls at the time is unclear: "It may seem reasonable to suspect a massacre with human sacrifices, perhaps even in connection with magical or religious ideas. Military conflicts can also play a role, for example conflicts between the village communities or within this large settlement," says Wunderlich. “Did these people fall victim to headhunters or did their fellow human beings practice a special death cult that had nothing to do with interpersonal violence? There are many opportunities."
The research team hopes to find more answers through detailed archaeological and osteological investigations, analysis of DNA, radiocarbon dating and isotopic analysis. "Finding the skulls themselves would be great, of course, but we don't have much hope here," says Furholt. "Nevertheless, Vráble has surprised us so often, who knows what else the site has in store for us".
Source: Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel; Specialist article: Scales of Transformation in Prehistoric and Archaic Societies 09Sidestone Press