Sometimes it is not the shattered walls, weapons or layers of fire that make a long-ago catastrophe tangible, but rather the simple scale of a pit. In 1972, in Gomolava, an Iron Age settlement site on the banks of the Sava in the north of what is now Serbia, researchers came across a mass grave that is barely three meters wide – and yet contains the remains of 77 people. Most of them were women and children.
