The bones have been unfold out throughout an almost 50-foot ditch, hundreds of them, bearing marks of a grisly finish. Snapped femurs. Bashed skulls. Bones with slicing cuts, as if somebody had butchered the pores and skin round them.
For greater than 50 years, the stays present in a shaft on the Charterhouse Warren Farm in southwest England have been a blip in British archaeological historical past. Discovered by cave explorers in 1970, the gathering of mismatched bones gave the impression to be simply one other Bronze Age gravesite — just a few victims scattered amongst sediment and animal skeletons.
Now, a latest examine revealed within the Cambridge University journal Antiquity suggests a stunningly grim saga performed out at Charterhouse Warren, at far larger scale than beforehand thought: The bones belong to a minimum of 37 males, girls and youngsters who have been slaughtered and presumably eaten in a ceremonial feast after their bloodbath.
“It’s taken us all aback. It was fully surprising, completely atypical for the interval and for nearly all of British prehistory,” stated Rick Schulting, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University who led the examine.
The Charterhouse Warren web site was first found in 1970, when cavers exterior Bristol revealed skeletal human stays in a pure, 50-foot shaft, apparently killed and buried someday between 2210 and 2010 B.C. But the cavers weren’t educated archaeologists, Mr. Schulting stated, and the file of the unique discover was scant on scientific particulars. The web site had largely fallen off the archaeological radar within the intervening many years, till the examine by Mr. Schulting and his workforce.
