As the archaeological record shows, mass violence with lethal intent has been a part of human history for at least several thousand years.
Most telling in this regard are the rare prehistoric massacre sites, where the skeletal remains of numerous victims of lethal collective violence are found in archaeological contexts that do not conform to the recognised and often quite diverse burial practices of the respective time and region.
These deviant depositional contexts, which are mainly characterised by the lack of recognisable post-mortem care, usually are either disorganised mass graves or sites of conflict where the victims' bodies have not been collected in one place but were just left unburied where they had fallen.1 Examples of both types of massacre site are known from the European Neolithic and it can be assumed that in these cases not enough of the victims' kinfolk in the widest sense survived who could have arranged and carried out a ‘proper' burial. Sites like these thereby indicate the likely more or less complete destruction of the targeted community.In those few currently known Neolithic cases where apparent mass violence victims were indeed buried with recognisable care, usually in neatly arranged multiple burials (as opposed to the often more disorganised mass graves), it is quite likely that a larger part of the respective group did survive and that the attack, if such took place, therefore either (partly) failed or was never intended as an all-out massacre of the complete community in the first place. Such cases are also difficult to differentiate from ritual practices, which might also have included actions that physically traumatised the human
This overview ofEarly Neolithic sites of collective violence is partly based on research that the author conducted with various colleagues over the years. Although the summary views expressed here are those of the author, the earlier input of all previous collaborators to the individual site studies is very gratefully acknowledged.
Special thanks are extended to Kurt W. Alt, Detlef Gronenborn, Veit Dresely and Harald Meller for their kind support.1 Christian Meyer et al., ‘Mass Graves of the LBK: Patterns and Peculiarities', in A. Whittle and P. Bickle (eds.), Early Farmers: The ViewfromArchaeology and Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 307-25. body. It is therefore important to keep in mind that, although skeletal injuries might clearly indicate a violent death for one or more individuals in a deviant burial feature, a reliable and lasting interpretation has to be firmly based upon a detailed analysis of the respective archaeological context at hand and more generally upon a comparative approach that incorporates related phenomena. And even then, interpretations need to be re-evaluated on a regular basis, especially if significant new methodological advances are made or new relevant sites are uncovered and analysed.
The earliest massacres currently known from Europe, with a massacre defined here as the violent killing of multiple victims by numerous assailants within a very short time and - importantly - followed by a careless treatment of the dead, date to the Early Neolithic period. People's lifeways at this time generally included more or less permanent settlements, systematic crop cultivation, livestock management, and everyday wood, stone, bone, leather, textile and pottery technology. The mainly settled lifestyle of the Neolithic also resulted in the establishment of permanent cemeteries and farming plots, which apparently were often utilised for several generations, indicating long-term investment of various resources. This in turn implies that inheritance of the physical means for successful agricultural subsistence became ever more important during the Neolithic, thereby furthering social inequality over time. This is in stark contrast to most pre-Neolithic societies, whose impact on the archaeological landscape was much more ephemeral, usually lacking permanent settlement and larger cemetery sites.
The very mobile Palaeolithic and Mesolithic communities ranged over huge areas, not being held in one place by the more localised constraints of a Neolithic farming way of life, which meant investing in fixed places over long periods of time, long-term storage of seeds and supplies and - following from that - the necessary demarcation of the group's sphere of influence where basic cooperative subsistence activities took place.Along with such cooperative behaviour, violent conflict is one of the basic types of human social interaction and has been called ‘a part of the fabric of humanness'.[569] It may be divided into the differing concepts of intra- and intercommunity conflict. While intra-community conflict usually involves only a few individuals and is therefore restricted in overall scale, inter-community conflict may involve a lot more individuals and therefore will usually take place on a larger scale. As human societies have to be characterised as cooperative by their very nature of internal coexisting, co-working and co-husbanding, many communities developed efficient ways to settle arising disputes without causing too much overall harm.[570] For the highly mobile pre-Neolithic groups within Europe, unburdened by the necessities of a sedentary agricultural lifestyle, one of the ways to settle inter-group conflicts would very likely have been avoidance,[571] basically moving away from the sources of disputes for a while and carrying on as before with life in some other, equally suited accessible place. For settled farmers, this same basic and effective behaviour was not as easily continued, especially on rather short notice, as it would entail abandoning the very means of subsistence, thereby losing much of the resources that had gone into the establishment and care of settlements, farming plots and socio-economic networks of varying extent. Of course the planned migration of groups had to be an integral part of the successful spread of Neolithic lifeways throughout Europe,[572] and individuals likely changed their places of residence over their lifetime, possibly thereby becoming ‘members' of different communities. In any case, both were different types of movement done for different reasons other than the typical avoidance behaviour practised by mobile groups in times of inter-community conflict.
However, we can surmise according to ethnographic parallels that when serious disagreements arose in prehistoric times between independent groups, and all previous ‘diplomatic' efforts had failed, the ultimate level of escalation was sometimes reached where one group might have considered the destruction of the opposing ‘others' as the only feasible option for settling the ongoing conflict. Such a targeted annihilation of one group by another within a short period of time,[573] might have been preserved in the bioarchaeological record as a massacre, which is the ‘most dramatic evidence of destruction' available in prehistoric archaeology.[574] Several examples of such massacres are indeed known from the Neolithic and even somewhat earlier periods. Recently, for example, the site of Nataruk, in Kenya, has been described as a massacre location, where at least a dozen individuals were
possibly violently killed. As the bodies had apparently not been collected in the aftermath, it is thought that they were sedimented where death occurred within a lagoon environment, although this view and interpretation have not gone unchallenged.[575] The age of the Nataruk site is given as c. 10,000 years, which predates a fully established Neolithic lifestyle in the region. Nevertheless, some characteristics of Neolithic societies were already in place in the area and it can be assumed that people in this time and place competed over limited resources that were fixed in the landscape. This is generally considered as one of the main underlying reasons for initiating warfare in prehistoric times, especially if the survival of the community was perceived to be threatened, for example by serious climatic changes making subsistence unsettlingly unpredictable.[576]
Focusing on the European Neolithic, several well-analysed sites (see below) now vividly show that massacres were chosen repeatedly as a last resort during times of warfare, which likely entailed the indiscriminate destruction of whole communities by various violent means, including outright killing and selective capturing.
As has been indicated by comparative research, such mass violence events usually do not happen spontaneously but need an extended time of ‘previous build-up of the right atmosphere’,[577] [578] for example, of perceived dominance of one group by another. Furthermore, the dominant group will usually feel capable of wiping out the other without critically endangering themselves and very likely will take steps to dehumanise the victims in the eyes of their own community, easing the stress of actually meting out lethal mass violence. This is especially relevant when considering who was actively involved in the massacres, as during most of the European Neolithic, in contrast to later periods, there do not seem to have been professional warriors or even numerous weapons specifically made to harm or kill other people. In consequence, the perpetrators of the early massacres will necessarily have been ‘ordinary’ people,11 using the available tools at hand that were suitable also for warfare. Although bows and arrows were dedicated weapons of the time, they were used only sparingly in the known massacres, at least as far as the hard evidence suggests. In addition, Early Neolithic bows are usually not primarily considered as weapons of war but rather, or equally, as implements for hunting.[579]This changes for later Neolithic periods as numerous arrow injuries in the form of projectile points embedded in human skeletal remains are known from various European sites, especially from the western part of the continent.[580] But in the earlier massacre sites located in central Europe examined in this chapter, most injuries found in the victim's skeletons were apparently caused by heavy hand-held wood and stone implements such as adzes and clubs. As has been recently shown for the Linearbandkeramik (LBK), the first full farming culture in central Europe, their adzes were not only tools and lethal weapons, but also embodied information related to social status, kinship, origin, and therefore social inequality, which was already present in the Early Neolithic.1[581]
Because of these ambiguities in the interpretation of the often multifunctional Neolithic weapons and tools, as well as in the interpretation of possible defensive structures in the landscape, these archaeological finds and features should only be considered as possible indicators for actual conflict on an inter-community scale.
The most reliable indicators and only direct evidence for serious prehistoric warfare, of which the massacres can be considered the rare and dramatic extremes, are the skeletal remains of the actual victims.[582] These, if analysed in detail, may show who was killed and who was possibly spared, how the killing was done, and what happened to the victims prior, during, and after the actual massacre events. The dedicated bioarchaeological analysis of multiple human skeletal remains recovered from non-standard burials, as well as other depositional features, allows us to shine targeted spotlights onto Neolithic collective violence and its specific contexts.Recognising Massacres in the Neolithic ‘Burial'
More on the topic As the archaeological record shows, mass violence with lethal intent has been a part of human history for at least several thousand years.:
- Violence and the Archaeological Record
- The Cold War occupies a rather unusual place in the history of organised mass violence.
- Violence is a part of every society's history, and China is no exception.
- American religious history began some 30,000 to 50,000 years ago when, according to archaeologists, the first human beings set foot on the North American continent.
- The archaeological evidence for violence and for the symbolic representation of violence in Iron Age Europe is abundant and complex.
- Violence is an essentially contested concept. Despite the fact that cooperation and communion with other sentient beings is at the heart of what it means to be human, in every period of history and in every culture,
- The Record of German Violence
- Werner Reiss, author of the most detailed recent discussion on the subject of violence in the Greek world, defined violence as ‘a physical act', stating further that it is a ‘process in which a human being inflicts harm on another human being via physical strength’.1
- Archaeological Evidence for Violence in the Later Stone Age
- This chapter examines the diverse communities of Britain from the ninth century bce to the early fifth century ce, and uses a Web of Violence model to examine the archaeological and primary source evidence for violence in both periods.
- The Contradictions of Mass Violence
- From Heresy Trials to Mass Violence
- In dealing with archaeological materials, some fundamental differences distinguish the study of religion from other archaeological sub-disciplines, such as subsistence, trade or social structures.
- Early Massacres: Mass Violence in Neolithic Europe
- The earliest traces of human habitation in Ukraine reach back about 150,000 years.
- Within the world history of violence the Bible is relevant for our reconstructions of the lived experience of violence among ancient Israelites and Judeans;
- Intent
- Twenty years after the first antibody test for the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), highly active antiretroviral therapy (HAART) became available in Western countries.
- In the seventy-three years since Primo Levi extolled us to ‘never forget' the genocide of Auschwitz, remembering the violence of the Holocaust has assumed many and varied forms.