More than 30 people ‘butchered and cannibalised’ in ‘exceptionally violent’ Bronze age massacre
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Victims from the Bronze Age were bludgeoned to death, with their bodies dismembered and butchered. Archaeologists have uncovered evidence of a 4,000-year-old massacre in Somerset, revealing the brutal slaughter and probable cannibalism of people in what is now believed to the bloodiest known act of violence in British prehistory.
![[Evidence of injuries on the bones]](https://static.independent.co.uk/2024/12/16/09/urn_cambridge.org_id_binary_20241129180134544-0099_S0003598X24001807_S0003598X24001807_fig2.jpg)
The remains, first discovered by cavers in the 1970s at a site in the Mendip Hills in Somerset, were recently analysed in a study that uncovered shocking details of the attack. Victims were bludgeoned to death, their bodies dismembered and butchered and some appear to have been eaten—likely as part of a ritual to “dehumanise” them and send a message by “insulting the remains”, according to Professor Rick Schulting of Oxford University.
Around 3,000 fragments of bones found at a cave system called Charterhouse Warren, near Cheddar Gorge, show that at least 37 men, women and children were killed at some point between 2200BC and 2000BC, with their bodies thrown into a deep natural shaft.
Given that villages in early Bronze Age Britain had between 50 and 100 residents, experts believe this might have amounted to the eradication of nearly a whole community. “Many of the victims’ skulls were shattered by the blows that killed them, and leg and arm bones had been cut away after death to extract the bone marrow,” said Prof Schulting, lead author of the study. Evidence of chewing marks on hand and foot bones points to human cannibalism. Nothing on this scale of violence has previously been documented in British prehistory, Prof Schulting said.
