Conclusions

Violent injuries diagnosed in human skeletal remains, sometimes tightly patterned, and several mass graves and other mass fatality sites reveal that collective lethal violence was already a significant part of Early Neolithic life in central Europe.

For human societies past and present, all changes of the natural environment are necessarily routed through individual cultural filters, so even if the currently known outbreaks of violence within the late LBK may have been ultimately triggered by natural phenomena, like a period of dramatic climatic instability for example, the overall picture is certainly far more complex than any monocausal theory can explain. Many unknown factors will have influenced the actions of the people affected by societal unrest during the Early Neolithic at different places and spread out over several decades at least, so it is of course impossible to explain every deviant and violent action with the same causes, even if the mass violence sites do seem to cluster in time very near the end of the LBK as a cultural entity. But, if sound and reliable patterns do emerge from dedicated comparative research, like those drawn together here for the mass violence sites of the LBK, it is quite likely that events occurring during a rather short period of time may in fact be caused by the same or at least closely interrelated factors.

It seems that already in the Early Neolithic, history was usually ‘written' by the victors, in this case mainly by ‘disappearing' the murdered and defeated victims of mass violence from the physical and spiritual landscape of the LBK, effectively silencing them almost forever. This silencing was mainly accom­plished by the conscious non-employment of the common ‘vocabulary of burial practices' of the LBK,^[610] thereby denying the violence victims a careful burial geared towards individual commemoration. But with the advent of refined bioarchaeological techniques, the tables may sometimes be turned and the skeletal remains of the dead, if rediscovered by chance, may actually become the main and largely only source of information about past mass violence events. The meticulous analysis of these remains may then illumi­nate the victims' side of events, how they were possibly interrelated among each other, which injuries they suffered and how mass violence and its context may have changed throughout the Neolithic and later periods. A number of later Neolithic mass and multiple graves are known from several different cultures and these show yet another set of unique character­istics, like for example a careful arrangement of a high number of bodies with skeletal signs of lethal violence within one grave,^[611] a combination that is so far unknown for the LBK. Moving into the Bronze Age, more orderly graves containing multiple individuals continue to be used, but now whole battle­fields are also emerging,^[612] that furthermore suggest the establishment of a dedicated warrior class that is distinct from the all-round farming and fighting man of the Early Neolithic.

Again, the interpretation of complex mass violence-related funerary sites in the widest sense may change with new discoveries and can always only reflect the current state of research. For the Early Neolithic massacre and other mass violence sites in central Europe the following can currently be stated: (a) mass violence victims as a group are mainly characterised by the presence of perimortem cranial injuries and to a lesser degree by post-cranial injuries; (b) mass violence victims are found in deviant depositional contexts without careful arrangement of the bodies, mostly located within a settlement area, not a cemetery; and (c) we lack recognisable evidence for extended post-mortem ritual treatment. Finally, (d) a victim's previously existing individual identity, which, under different circumstances, might have been expressed in a neatly prepared single burial, is violently suppressed and culturally negated.