Warfare in Neolithic Europe by Julian Maxwell Heath

Author:Julian Maxwell Heath
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2017-04-11T04:00:00+00:00

Warfare Cannibalism at Fontbregoua?

The well-known site of Fontbrégoua Cave is located in Provence about 100 km from Marseille and the Mediterranean coast, and was excavated by André Taxil from 1948–1960, with further excavations conducted here by Jean Courtin in the 1970s. These excavations uncovered evidence that the cave was used repeatedly as a seasonal camp by various Neolithic groups between c. 5400–3600 BC, with cultural material such as pottery, stone tools, and carbonized grains recovered from three discrete areas: the porch, the main room, and the lower room (evidence that the cave had also used by Upper Palaeolithic or ‘Old Stone Age’ hunter-gatherers was also recovered). Also found in the floor of the cave were thirteen clusters of bones, which Neolithic people had placed in shallow, man-made hollows scattered randomly throughout the cave (they were dug between c. 5450–5100 BC). Ten of these were found to contain the butchered remains of wild and domestic animals such as boar, red deer, and sheep, while the other three only contained human bones, comprising the remains of at least twenty-one individuals, with six children and seven adults identified amongst this skeletal material. The excavators of the cave also surmised that there had probably been more clusters of human bone but that these had subsequently been disturbed by later Neolithic occupants of the cave.

Cut marks seen on the animal bones clearly showed that they had been processed for their meat, but there is a strong possibility that it was not just the meat from wild and domestic animals that was being eaten by Neolithic people at Fontebrégoua, but human beings too. This controversial claim was made by Paola Villa and her colleagues, after their subsequent analysis of the human bones recovered from the cave. Writing in the academic journal Science, they argued that ‘the analysis of these bones strongly suggests that humans were butchered, processed, and probably eaten in a manner that closely parallels the treatment of wild and domestic animals at Fontebrégoua’.2 It was a bold claim, but it was one that Villa and her colleagues were perfectly entitled to make, for as Karoline Lukaschek has said in her discussion of the skeletal evidence from the cave: ‘With respect to cut mark location and morphology [type], a remarkable degree of concordance can be observed between animal and human bones: 70 per cent of the cut mark varieties on the human bones can be matched to similar marks on corresponding animals’.3 Some of the human long bones also display fractures that are indicative of marrow extraction, and the more extensive defleshing of the human skulls, in contrast to the animal ones, may perhaps be because they were skinned and then kept as trophies or ritual objects. Along with fragments from a stone bracelet, pieces from a broken stone axe were found with one of the human bone clusters (Feature H3), and chop marks seen on a rib and vertebra found in this feature were probably made by this axe.

Unsurprisingly, given the strong feelings that

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