In a series of “victory” celebrations more than 6,000 years ago in northeastern France, a group of defenders severed the left arms of their conquered enemies and buried them in pits, archaeologists have found.
The discovery provides a glimpse into a time when warfare was rampant in the region and when invaders pushed into northeastern France from the area around Paris.
The “lower limbs were [fractured] in order to prevent the victims from escaping, the entire body shows blunt force traumas and, what it is more, in some skeletons there are some marks — piercing holes — that may indicate that the bodies were placed on a structure for public exposure after being tortured and killed,” study co-author Teresa Fernández-Crespo, an osteoarchaeologist at Valladolid University in Spain, told Live Science in an email.
In a paper published Wednesday (Aug. 20) in the journal Science Advances, researchers analyzed the remains of 82 people buried in pits in northeastern France sometime between 4300 and 4150 B.C. Some of the bodies were mutilated, with their left arms and hands dismembered. Bodies that were not mutilated were buried in different pits.
To investigate whether the burial treatments reflected people’s origins, researchers analyzed the chemical signatures of the teeth and bone, which gave clues about where the people grew up and the food they consumed. The people who were mutilated came from outside the local area, possibly around Paris. The chemical signatures also suggested that this group of people ate food that originated from different areas, hinting that they moved around a lot, the researchers wrote in the study.
But the chemical analysis showed that those who were not mutilated were locals. This could mean they died defending their territory, the researchers suggested.
Some of the invaders were likely captured by the defenders, and their left arms or hands were severed as “trophies” in one of the earliest well-documented instances of martial victory celebration in prehistoric Europe, the researchers wrote.
“We believe they were brutalized in the context of rituals of triumph or celebrations of victory that followed one or several battles,” Fernández-Crespo said. Because the burial pits were located in the middle of a settlement, this “firmly suggests that the act would have been a public theater of violence intended to dehumanize the captive enemies in front of the entire community.”
A time of conflict
There is other evidence for widespread conflict in this region around 4500 to 4000 B.C.
Detlef Gronenborn, an archaeology professor at the Leibniz Center for Archaeology in Germany who was not part of the research team, told Live Science in an email that the “period in question is a time of considerable unrest Europe-wide and is linked to a period of high climate volatility, a continent-wide crisis period, all [culminating] around 4100” B.C. Breaks in occupation of sites suggest “a sudden high mobility due to a general increase in warfare,” Gronenborn said. “The entire period is also characterized by a general population push originating from southern France and possibly bringing unrest and an increase in [warfare] in the wake of these migrations.”
Linda Fibiger, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not part of the research team, told Live Science in an email that “it’s an exciting, well executed and carefully interpreted find that gives important insights into the varied practice of violence in the Neolithic.”
The chemical analysis has “made it possible to achieve something as important as distinguishing between captives and attackers in prehistoric contexts of interpersonal violence as far back as the Neolithic,” Miguel Ángel Moreno-Ibáñez, an osteoarchaeologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not part of the research team, told Live Science in an email.
This was a time of warfare when people in the region lived in fortified settlements, and skeletons frequently reveal evidence of violence. Pottery from the Paris area shows up in greater amounts, and archaeologists believe that people from the Paris area were invading what is now northeastern France.
“Injuries provoked in Neolithic battles usually targeted the head and very less often other body parts,” Fernández-Crespo said, but these pits in France reveal “an unprecedent[ed] intensity of violence to the body that can only be understood in a context of torture, mutilation and dehumanization of the victim.” These brutal attacks may have been carried out as an act of revenge, the researchers noted in the study.