A brutal massacre from the Iron Age may have affected women and children

Women and children may have been deliberately targeted in one of the largest prehistoric mass murders discovered in Europe. Buried together in a single grave more than 2,800 years ago, most of the 77 victims suffered a violent death, which appears to have been a deliberate act.

The mass grave was found in Gomolava, an Early Iron Age site in the Carpathian Basin in present-day Serbia. The site is a man-made mound known as a tell, created by the accumulation of debris from a thousand years of human settlement from the late 6th millennium BC, including collapsed structures of adobe, pottery and organic material.

Linda Fibiger at the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom and her colleagues looked at bones from the grave, deposited in Museum of Vojvodina in Novi Sad, Serbia, and collected DNA and isotope evidence to determine what happened.

Of the 77 individuals, 51 were children and adolescents. It was possible to determine the biological sex of 72 individuals, of which 51 were women.

A 1976 analysis of the bones attributed the deaths to the pandemic, but a new skeletal analysis found unhealed injuries consistent with violence, as well as evidence of defensive injuries and some projectile injuries.

“Many of the injuries are to the head, and most appear to be close contact injuries. The magnitude of the injury speaks to unlimited force, so it’s an intentional kill, not an accidental kill,” says Fibiger. “I think it was a pretty brutal event.

The team analyzed DNA from the bones of 25 individuals and monitored the ratios of strontium, oxygen and carbon isotopes in the tooth enamel of 24 people, which can be used to reconstruct environmental conditions during childhood. This showed that most of the selected individuals were not closely related and had different diets when young.

“Most of them weren’t even related 12 generations back,” says a team member Barry Molloy at University College Dublin in Ireland. It suggests that people were part of an extended society that would share common cultural practices, but that did not necessarily pair with people from other groups.

The massacre took place in the 9th century BC when mobile herders who used the land seasonally came from the Eurasian steppe on the other side of the Carpathians. At the same time, people in the area were reoccupying old sites, establishing gated settlements and farming the surrounding land, Molloy says.

“You have these two conflicting uses of the landscape,” he says, adding that the staking of land claims may have created conflict between groups and displaced people from their homes.

“The fact that these were women and children suggests to us that there was something quite different going on here than our usual reading of violent warfare. It normally focuses on the battlefield,” says Molloy.

The perpetrators may have taken the younger children away as slaves, he says, so killing them may have been intended to send a message to surrounding nations to quell resistance and assert dominance over the land.

“It’s difficult to interpret a massacre,” he says Pere Gelabert at the University of Vienna, Austria. “The Iron Age was a period of extreme instability throughout Europe, a period of numerous armed conflicts or wars as we would call them today.” The mass grave could have been the result of a ritual massacre in which women and children were singled out for killing, or it could be that only those people died because the men were elsewhere, he says.

However, the story gets complicated because the bodies were buried along with personal possessions such as bronze jewelry and ceramic vessels for drinking and storing food. The remains of animals, including a slaughtered calf, were buried with them, and broken stones for grinding grain and burnt seeds were placed on the grave. “It’s a whole food cycle, all stored next to them,” Molloy says.

This suggests that the burial was elaborate and symbolic. The killers and those who performed the funeral rites may have been different groups, Molloy says.

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