The bones were spread out across a nearly 50-foot ditch, thousands of them, bearing marks of a grisly end. Snapped femurs. Bashed skulls. Bones with slicing cuts, as if someone had butchered the skin around them.
For more than 50 years, the remains found in a shaft at the Charterhouse Warren Farm in southwest England have been a blip in British archaeological history. Discovered by cave explorers in 1970, the collection of mismatched bones seemed to be just another Bronze Age grave site — a few victims scattered among sediment and animal skeletons.
Now a recent study published in the Cambridge University journal Antiquity suggests a stunningly grim saga played out at Charterhouse Warren, at far greater scale than previously thought: The bones belong to at least 37 men, women and children who were slaughtered and possibly eaten in a ceremonial feast after their massacre.
“It’s taken us all aback. It was completely unexpected, totally atypical for the period and for almost all of British prehistory,” said Rick Schulting, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University who led the study.
The Charterhouse Warren site was first discovered in 1970, when cavers outside Bristol revealed skeletal human remains in a natural, 50-foot shaft, apparently killed and buried sometime between 2210 and 2010 B.C. But the cavers weren’t trained archaeologists, Schulting said, and the record of the original find was scant on clinical details. The site had largely fallen off the archaeological radar in the intervening decades, until the study by Schulting and his team.
Human prehistory is a primitive, brutal chapter, but even in such context, the researchers’ conclusions about the Charterhouse Warren incident stand apart. It was almost certainly a single, mass casualty event that left dozens of men, women and children dead, dismembered and stripped of flesh, according to the study. There is little evidence that the victims were armed, and instead, it appeared to have been that they were either captive or completely surprised by the attack.
The remains tell a grisly, if incomplete, story: On one jaw bone, there are signs that attackers cut out the victim’s tongue. Rudimentary scratches and slices suggest skin and muscle was sliced from bones. Smaller fragments of hands and feet show signs of repeated gnawing — “consistent with the flat molars of omnivores, including humans,” the study said.
“It’s hard to see what else you could do to a person,” Schulting said.
Perhaps even more disturbing than the acts themselves is the apparent scale. Archaeologists noted the sheer number of consumed humans and animals suggests that hundreds of guests might have attended this grisly feast.
The enduring mystery around the Charterhouse Warren remains, though, is: Why? The incident bears little resemblance to any other archaeological discoveries nearby, and there is no historical context that easily explains such a brutal, indiscriminate massacre.
Archaeologists only know that the massacre’s message was as primal as its means: It was a formidable sign, a warning, to make an example of the deceased and elevate the killers. News of such violence, archaeologists believe, would have quickly spread across insular Bronze Age communities.
“The impression that it gives, of being one-off or completely unique, is misleading,” Schulting said. Such shocking conduct would almost certainly have inspired revenge killings or attacks, but unlike the Charterhouse Warren grave, those remains might have been left in the open, lost to history.
“I don’t think this could happen without consequences,” Schulting said.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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