Cannibalistic Coping Mechanism? The Bronze Age “Othering” of Fallen Foes
A gruesome discovery in the United Kingdom has thrown a shadow over Bronze Age England. The find, at the ancient site of Charterhouse Warren in Somerset, has been described as “something horrible.”
Here archaeologists have found a great pit, dug by our ancestors and at least 15 meters deep. In the pit were the remains of at least 37 individuals, identified from thousands of bone fragments.
Worse still was what happened to the bodies before they were flung into the pit. Damage to the skeletons reveals that these people had been butchered, and partly consumed by whoever had killed them.
The study of the site, from researchers at Oxford University and published in Antiquity, describes the pit as holding interpersonal violence on a scale unknown from British prehistory. Worse still, this find has the potential to rewrite our understanding of Bronze Age England.
Professor Rick Schulting from the University of Oxford, lead author of the research, explains in a press release published on Eurekalert: “We actually find more evidence for injuries to skeletons dating to the Neolithic period in Britain than the Early Bronze Age, so Charterhouse Warren stands out as something very unusual. It paints a considerably darker picture of the period than many would have expected.”
The bodies of men, women and children were all found in the pit. The skulls of the individuals show how these people died: blunt force trauma from a heavy object, often from behind. These people were taken by surprise and died without a fight.
However the greater mystery revolves around what happened after these individuals died. Their bones were broken and their flesh sawed, apparently in preparation for it being consumed, but why? There were many animal bones in the pit mixed in with the human bodies, no scarcity of resources here, no need to resort to cannibalism for mere survival.
The study has a theory, and it is harrowing. It suggests that the butchering and consumption of these individuals was, in a sense, a violent “othering” of the dead bodies. By reducing them to so many joints of meat the butchers may have been trying to dehumanize the dead, as a way of seeing them as animals rather than humans and therefore coping with what they had done.
We know of cannibalism from the Stone Age, for example from nearby Gough’s Cave in Cheddar Gorge, but this is different. The flesh there was eaten as part of a Paleolithic funeral ritual, but that is not the case for Charterhouse Warren.
And why the violence in the first place, that led to these deaths? Evidence in the teeth of two of the children may hold the answer: the teeth bore signs of infection with the plague. This was a surprise to the authors of the study however, and they offer no conclusive thoughts on whether this may have led to the violence.
“Charterhouse Warren is one of those rare archaeological sites that challenges the way we think about the past”, concludes Professor Schulting. “It is a stark reminder that people in prehistory could match more recent atrocities and shines a light on a dark side of human behaviour. That it is unlikely to have been a one-off event makes it even more important that its story is told.”
