Patterns and Peculiarities

As indicated by the question marks in the above subheadings, for each of the LBK mass violence sites listed, bioarchaeological interpretation can never claim to be absolute and final.

The first mass violence site discovered - Talheim - still remains the archetypal mass grave, where the victims have been gathered and disposed of collectively in a seemingly pragmatic fashion within a settlement context, lacking all indications for a ritual and careful burial. This way of deposition marks all the known LBK mass graves as deviant burials, even within the wide array of diverse funerary treatments known for this culture. The main difference between the mass graves and most other LBK funerary features is the absence of recognisable post-mortem attention awarded to the deceased. This in turn signifies that their individual cultural identity, which would usually have been incorporated into their funeral rites by careful arrange­ment, orientation and often provisioning, has been ostentatiously disregarded.^[600] One interpretation might be that those identities were not known or of no consequence to the persons responsible for the final deposi­tion of the bodies because the victims' community might have been violently destroyed by them or by others.

The demographic profiles of the massacre sites show that everyone could become a victim of collective lethal violence, regardless of age or sex. In contrast, it can be assumed also for the LBK that the perpetrators of lethal violence will have been mostly men. Especially so, as the known LBK weaponry evidently used for mass killing is clearly associated with the male sex and possibly also charged with symbolic meaning.^[602] This also fits the observation that younger adult women of reproductive age were possibly spared during the massacres to some degree. It seems likely that they were captured by the predominantly male aggressors if an attack on a settled community was successful, leaving everyone else either dead or scattered.

As far as the skeletal remains indicate, the killing itself was largely accom­plished by targeting the head with blunt force trauma delivered by heavy close-quarter shock weapons. The massacre sites show injuries distributed all over the skull, with a slight dominance of trauma occurring in the rear of the head. This corresponds well with the expectation of comparative massacre research for the attacking group to usually be a superior force more or less able to overrun a far lesser one that should then have been prone to flight rather than fight back.^[603] In contrast to that, the mass grave of Halberstadt shows a combination of a skewed demographic profile towards younger men as victims and a much more tightly circumscribed pattern of cranial injuries than at all other LBK sites known so far.

In addition to the frequent cranial perimortem blunt force injuries, sharp force trauma occurs at the mass violence sites, probably mostly caused by arrowheads. Although this type of injury is rather rarely diagnosed in the skeletal remains from these Early Neolithic mass fatality sites, it is highly likely that sharp force will actually have been used frequently during the massacres. Comparative research has shown that arrows for example hit bone rather rarely when shot at human targets, only leaving soft tissue injuries in most cases.^[604] If projectiles are later removed from the bodies before deposition, these injuries, even if critical or lethal, will often become invisible with skeletonisation. It follows that the actual amount of arrow or other sharp force injuries cannot be reliably assessed and even if no evidence remains of them this cannot be used as evidence of their absence. This is different for the blunt force injuries. These will have routinely broken bone if applied with enough force to be effective and the ubiquitous presence of blunt force cranial injuries in all the mass violence sites shows this apparently was the preferred method of permanently dispatching opponents. At Kilianstädten blunt force was additionally used to specifically destroy the long bones of the lower legs of many individuals.

One important reason for incomplete and damaged skeletons is animal activity. While burrowing animals may chance upon burials at any time between deposition and recovery, often displacing or removing smaller bones, it is perimortem carnivore activity which - if identified - has to be an integral part of the interpretation. Regarding the Early Neolithic mass violence sites, the human remains discovered at Asparn and Halberstadt show such carnivore alteration, which indicates that the bodies were acces­sible for carnivores for at least some time. This significantly adds to the previously identified post-mortem neglect that the victims apparently suf­fered, which in turn demonstrates that these sites and/or features likely do not represent ritual burials, but rather pragmatic depositions. Although excarnation was apparently practised by some later Neolithic groups,^[605] the obvious co-occurrence of numerous lethal injuries, deviant deposition and carnivore damage does not currently support a similar scenario for the Early Neolithic LBK.

Influenced by the results of the research conducted at Herxheim, it has recently been suggested that several of the other LBK mass fatality sites might actually be of a ritualistic nature as well.^[606] While it has to be acknowledged that a differentiation between more ritualistic and more pragmatic practices can certainly be challenging or sometimes even impossible, especially in the light of incompletely preserved burial assemblages from an extinct archae­ological culture several thousand years in the past, the LBK mass violence sites are in fact mainly characterised by the noticeable lack of recognisable (burial) ritual, as far as this can be determined by archaeological means.^[607] Again it is Herxheim that most clearly shows how much time, effort and meticulous attention could be invested into the post-mortem treatment and alteration of the bodies, whose remains were embedded along with other kinds of highly selected artefactual remains at a clearly special deposition site. In stark contrast to that, the lack of selected accompanying artefacts and of any kind of recognisable attention given to the deceased at the sites of Talheim, Kilianstädten and Halberstadt, their collective, anonymous and apparently utterly careless deposition in some likely pre-existing pit in or near a possibly random settlement all point to the assumption that these people were more likely the victims of mundane warfare than the centre­pieces of extended ritualistic practices. Certainly they did not receive an individualised standard burial like the overwhelming majority of their known contemporaries.

So far, each newly discovered Early Neolithic mass fatality site has added further and previously unknown data to the overall funerary picture of the LBK, so it is quite likely that future discoveries will enable even more detailed assessments of the patterns and peculiarities of LBK burial, ritual, mass violence, warfare and post-mortem treatment of human bodies.