Ditch full of 7,000-year-old headless human skeletons discovered in Slovakia, baffling archaeologists

a composite image of aerial photos of excavated graves with an illustration of the individual skeletons — The mass burial of skeletons in the settlement ditch (below) with drawings of the individual skeletons (above).

(Image credit: Katharina Fuchs, Agnes Heitmann, Nils Müller-Scheeßel, Till Kühl)

At the entrance to a Stone Age neighborhood in Slovakia, archaeologists have uncovered a ditch full of headless human skeletons.

While the bones reveal cut marks that signal decapitation, researchers think the practice was not a violent mass killing but rather part of a complex burial ritual more than 7,000 years ago. In other words, the individuals were likely beheaded postmortem.

The researchers analyzed cut marks on the upper neck vertebrae of the headless skeletons and found that the skulls had been removed with sharp tools. The lower jaws were missing as well, suggesting that keeping the head and face intact was important to this ancient society, the researchers wrote. Because the neck vertebrae of many individuals were found touching the ditch wall, the researchers think they were likely deposited there after their heads were removed, in a practice of intentional manipulation of corpses.

Headless bodies and body parts have been found in burials at other Neolithic sites in Europe. For example, a Neolithic family was apparently massacred and eaten 5,600 years ago, according to an analysis of the bones of 11 people found in a cave in Spain. And in a Neolithic village in Italy, archaeologists found a pile of 15 human skulls that were probably handled repeatedly as some form of ancestor ritual 7,400 years ago.

The researchers noted in the study that they do not yet know if violence played a role in how the individuals in the ditch died. However, given the fact that some of the headless individuals were buried together as couples and some were buried in clusters in a mass grave, the beheading practice may have been motivated by a burial rite that focused on the human head, possibly as a symbol of personhood and life.

This interpretation would fit in with head-focused ancestor worship in other parts of the Neolithic world, such as at Çatalhöyük in southern Turkey and Jericho, now a Palestinian city in the West Bank. In Jericho and other Neolithic Near East sites, people often extracted skulls from venerated ancestors, plastered over them to form a face, painted them, and then displayed them in the community.

It is possible, the researchers wrote, that some sort of community tension existed between the three Neolithic neighborhoods at Vráble. This tension could explain why only one neighborhood was surrounded by a protective ditch and why its entrances faced away from the other two neighborhoods. Burying human bodies in the ditch may have been a way to manipulate the community's space or mark it as specifically belonging to the group and its ancestors.

"The first results already show that Vráble is an exceptional excavation site," study first author Martin Furholt, an archaeologist at the University of Kiel, said in the statement. "It provides us with the keys for the discussion of fundamental questions; for example, how were death and the body understood in the Neolithic and what role did the associated practices play in the social fabric of early farming societies?"

Kristina Killgrove is a staff writer at Live Science with a focus on archaeology and paleoanthropology news. Her articles have also appeared in venues such as Forbes, Smithsonian, and Mental Floss. Kristina holds a Ph.D. in biological anthropology and an M.A. in classical archaeology from the University of North Carolina, as well as a B.A. in Latin from the University of Virginia, and she was formerly a university professor and researcher. She has received awards from the Society for American Archaeology and the American Anthropological Association for her science writing.