Females and children may have been deliberately targeted in one of the largest prehistoric massacres uncovered in Europe. Interred together in a single grave over 2,800 years ago, the majority of the 77 victims perished violently, suggesting a clear act of intent. The findings of a new study were published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.
This extensive burial site was unearthed at Gomolava, an Early Iron Age location within the Carpathian Basin, situated in present-day Serbia. The site is a man-made mound, known as a tell, formed by accumulated debris from millennia of human occupation stretching back to the late 6th millennium BCE, featuring collapsed mud-brick structures, pottery, and organic remnants.
Linda Fibiger from the University of Edinburgh (UK) and her team analyzed the skeletal remains from the grave, housed at the Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad (Serbia), gathering both DNA and isotopic data to reconstruct the events that transpired.
Out of the 77 individuals, 51 were children and adolescents. Biological sex could be determined for 72 people, with 51 of those being female.
Skeletal analysis conducted in 1976 had linked the deaths to a pandemic, but the new examination of the skeletons revealed unhealed injuries consistent with assault, alongside evidence of defensive wounds and some projectile damage.
“A lot of the trauma is to the head, and most of it appears to be close-contact trauma. The size of the injuries suggests unrestrained force, meaning deliberate killing rather than accidental,” states Fibiger. “I think it was a pretty brutal event.”
The group analyzed DNA from 25 individuals and examined the ratios of strontium, oxygen, and carbon isotopes in the dental enamel of 24 people, data that can reconstruct childhood environmental conditions. This revealed that most examined individuals were not closely related to each other and had varied diets during their youth.
“The majority of them weren’t even relatives within 12 generations,” notes Barry Molloy from University College Dublin in Ireland. He posits that these people belonged to a widely spread society sharing common cultural practices but not necessarily merging with other groups.
The massacre took place in the 9th century BCE, a period when nomadic herders, who used the lands seasonally, arrived from the Eurasian steppe across the Carpathian Mountains. Concurrently, according to Molloy, the local inhabitants were reoccupying older mounds, establishing fortified settlements, and cultivating the surrounding lands.
“What we see here are two competing ways of using the landscape,” he explains, suggesting that competing claims over land might have sparked conflict between the groups, forcing people from their homes.
“The fact that it was women and children tells us this was something quite separate from what we normally understand as violent warfare. That is usually centered on the battlefield,” Molloy comments.
He suggests that the perpetrators might have enslaved younger children, implying that the killing of the women and children could have been intended as a message to neighboring populations to quell resistance and assert dominance over the territory.
“This massacre is difficult to interpret,” says Pere Gelabert from the University of Vienna in Austria. “The Iron Age was a time of extreme instability across Europe, a period of numerous armed conflicts or wars, as we might call them today.” The mass burial could stem from a ritual mass killing where women and children were specifically chosen for execution, or perhaps these were the only ones who perished because the men were elsewhere, he suggests.
However, the narrative is complicated by the fact that the bodies were buried alongside personal belongings, such as bronze ornaments and ceramic vessels for drinking and food storage. Animal remains, including a butchered calf, were also interred with them, and debris from grinding stones used for grain and burnt seeds were placed on the grave. “It’s the whole food cycle, all of it next to them,” says Molloy.
This implies that the burials were deliberate and symbolic. It is possible that the killers and those who performed the funeral rites belonged to different groups, Molloy concludes.
About the Author
