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The main characteristic of massacres is the violent death of many people at the same time, actively caused by another group, which defined the victims as unwanted others.[583] To actually recognise a prehistoric massacre in the archaeological record it is therefore necessary to find the physical remains of the victims, as only these represent direct evidence for it.
The bioarchaeolo- gical indicators are then usually twofold: the skeletal remains show clear signs of perimortem injuries; and they were embedded into the archaeological record roughly contemporaneously and within a well-defined area, which might have been a single feature of deviant deposition (such as a mass grave), a few different features of a similar kind (such as neighbouring pits or ditches), or the actual massacre location itself (if simply left on the ground). If the victims were recognisably buried in a regular manner instead, which in the European Neolithic usually would have been individual inhumation within an attritional cemetery, or inclusion in a collective grave, they would have been disassociated from the context of the massacre and each other, which in turn might have obscured the massacre event itself. Attritional burial sites are characterised by their long duration of use and it is usually impossible to reconstruct a burial chronology detailed enough to confidently state that some burials were actually contemporaneous within a timespan of just a few days. This is necessary to securely identify a massacre, which by definition is limited to a very short duration of time. Only if the burial context is somewhat unusual, including several individuals with clear signs of perimortem injury buried in the same grave, that is, a multiple burial, can a massacre actually be identified from a regular cemetery site. If direct biological kinship can additionally be proven among the victims, and their demography fits a related part of a living community, this is a further strong argument for their contemporaneity.[584]If the deceased were placed in a larger collective grave instead, where intermixing of skeletal elements happened on a frequent basis with almost each successive burial, it becomes even more difficult to identify contemporaneous massacre victims.
After a period of ongoing funerary use, even a simultaneously deposited cluster of bodies will have been ‘diluted' by the intrusion of skeletal remains of earlier and possibly later burials just by taphonomical factors alone. The recognition of prehistoric massacres is also made more difficult or is even precluded if the skeletal remains of the suspected victims have undergone extended ritualistic treatment, which again means that the bodies have been disassociated from the immediate massacre context and have entered into a new and likely highly complex one. Within this new context, post-mortem practices, possibly including defleshing, dismemberment and mutilation, might have been superimposed upon the traces of collective violence, possibly even obliterating them completely.[585] Even if these slightly more recent traces might be very similar to those of a massacre, their ultimate purpose might have been radically different, for example including ancestor veneration or complex funeral rites. For the time frame and region relevant here, the enigmatic depositions of human remains at the Ofnet Cave and at the enclosure site of Herxheim, both located within southern Germany, are examples of this dilemma. At Ofnet, numerous detached heads have been arranged with deliberation and care in two clusters, accompanied by some artefacts. Dated to the Late Mesolithic, these cranial remains and associated cervical vertebrae might stem from a massacre,[586] as perimortem injuries are evident on the skulls, but their careful manner of deposition indicates something more and possibly even completely different. The Early Neolithic site of Herxheim has also been discussed as the scene of a massacre initially by some authors, but more recently also as evidence for complex secondary burial rites, cannibalism and/or human sacrifice.[587] Some perimortem injuries found in the skeletal remains might indicate a violent death for some or even most of the individuals encountered there, but the decidedly patterned dismemberment and meticulous processing of a very large number of bodies suggest that highly complex ritual activities were practised there for quite some time, and also repeatedly, that cannot easily be reduced to a conceptually more simple, single and rather short-lived massacre event.[588]Following this general outline, the remainder of this chapter will mostly focus on the Early Neolithic of central Europe and the aforementioned Linearbandkeramik, as this archaeologically well-defined ‘culture' has not only produced ambiguous sites like Herxheim, but also the earliest well- identified massacres and mass killings in this region.
Although the scars of interpersonal violence are sometimes, but rather rarely, seen in individuals from regular LBK burials, by far the most evidence for lethal violence known from the time of these early farmers comes in collective form, mainly as massive perimortem blunt force cranial injuries in simultaneously killed groups of people. In these samples arrow wounds are documented as well, along with possible torture and/or mutilation of the victims, which fits the expectations derived from comparative massacre research already touched upon.
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