2,800-year-old mass grave of women and children discovered in Serbia reveals 'brutal, deliberate and efficient' violence

Archaeologists have analyzed a mass grave in southeastern Europe that held the remains of women and children who were violently murdered 2,800 years ago. The grave may be key to understanding the evolution of strategic mass violence in the Early Iron Age, researchers reported in a new study.

The grave was unearthed at the archaeological site of Gomolava, located near the modern town of Hrtkovci in northern Serbia. Originally founded as a settlement on the Sava River in the sixth millennium B.C., both settled and mobile cultural groups used Gomolava repeatedly over the centuries. By the ninth century B.C., semisedentary groups in the Carpathian Basin were consolidating around sites like Gomolava, creating tension over land use and ownership.

Gomolava "was situated at a physical, political and conceptual flashpoint" — and the consequences of these new interactions were deadly, researchers wrote in the study, which was published Monday (Feb. 23) in the journal Nature Human Behaviour.

The researchers focused their analysis on a small mass grave at Gomolava that was just 9.5 feet (2.9 meters) in diameter and 1.6 feet (0.5 m) deep. Archaeologists discovered postholes around the burial pit that suggested there had been some sort of memorialization of the grave. The pit also contained ceramic vessels and small, bronze accessories, along with the bones of nearly 100 animals, including the complete skeleton of a young cow at the very bottom of the grave.

But when the researchers began to study the 77 human skeletons in the pit, they found that more than 70% of the skeletons were female and 69% were children.

"The predominance of women and younger individuals in the mass grave at Gomolava is exceptional in European prehistory," the researchers wrote.

Additionally, the archaeologists found extensive evidence of intentional, violent, lethal trauma to the victims' heads involving "close contact and especially blunt force, which could have resulted from a number of implements or weapons," they wrote. The attackers may have been significantly taller than the victims or on horseback, given the location of the injuries, the team said.

"Overall, the patterning reveals severe violence that was brutal, deliberate and efficient," the researchers wrote.

To learn more about the victims, the researchers studied the individuals' DNA. This analysis revealed that only a handful of the 77 people had close biological ties, which suggests that the killing was not a raid on a settlement of extended families. A study of the skeletons' strontium isotope ratios — a chemical variant found in dental enamel that is influenced by geographic origin — also showed that more than one-third of the people grew up outside the Gomolava region.

"It is clear that this is a heterogenous assembly of individuals," study lead author Linda Fibiger, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email. Gomolava was "a focus for burying predominantly women and children that had been brutally killed at the time," she said.

But the reason for the mass violence remains elusive.

In the ninth century B.C., myriad cultural groups were moving and settling across the Carpathian Basin. This population influx, coupled with tension between mobile and sedentary lifestyles, may have created a "potentially explosive set of conflicting ideologies of land use and ownership," the researchers wrote. This tension may have led to the forced migration or displacement of certain people, the capture and killing of specific groups, and the exchange of women and children through marriage or fostering.

"There is nothing osteologically or archaeologically that indicates that these individuals were captured and held for a while," Fibiger said. "We are looking at shifting settlement structure, land use and most likely accompanying power structures."

A second mass grave was also found at Gomolava in 1954. That pit held mostly female skeletons in addition to the bones of animals, metal objects and ceramics that date to the same era.

Both mass graves may have been intended as hoards of valuable objects and people, the researchers wrote. Women and children were vital for these communities' survival, leading the researchers to conclude that these individuals' murders were intended as genealogical disruption.

"Taken together, the killing event, the mortuary event and the resulting monument signal a chain of actions intended to forcibly resolve or eradicate conflict and rebalance power within or between communities," the researchers wrote, resulting in "mass violence and assertion of power in prehistoric Europe."