Dr. Till Kühl / University of Kiel
Skulls were absent, with a single exception: the skeleton of a child, whose head was in place. Nobody knows why or where the heads are. But there was no violence in this curious story.
The collective grave discovered near the town of Vráble, in Slovakia, continues to make people talk.
According to the most recent published on the 2nd about the mysterious place that has already been the subject of , a total of 77 headless skeletons were found in the ditch, prompting new questions about how the first agricultural communities in Central Europe dealt with death, the body and funeral rituals.
The archaeological site, inhabited between 5250 and 4950 BC., began to be excavated in 2012. At first glance, it appeared to be a relatively conventional Neolithic settlement, with around 300 houses spread over three areas and surrounded by a ditch. Some burials were identified in 2016 and 2017, but it wasn’t until 2022 that researchers realized the highly unusual scale of the discovery.
Inside the pit were the remains of 77 decapitated individuals. The skulls were absent, with a single exception: the skeleton of a childwhose head remained in place. The reason for this difference remains to be explained.
Despite the apparently violent nature of the discovery, the researchers consider unlikely to be a disorderly massacre, of an episode of war or a hasty response to a catastrophe, such as an epidemic.
Recent analysis of the bones rather suggests that the bodies were deposited deliberately, with recognizable patterns and signs of intentional manipulation.
Second Catherine Foxbiological anthropologist at the University of Kiel and co-author of the study, cited by , the first data indicate that There were no violent “beheadings” at the sitebut rather careful removals of the skulls. The deposition of bodies and body parts may, therefore, have integrated complex, repeated and meaningful practices.
Among the open hypotheses are human sacrifice, the symbolic capture of the head — often associated with identity and life — or a funeral ritual in which the skull assumed a central role.
The main problem, the study authors emphasize, is that the heads remain “invisible” from an archaeological point of view: it is not known where they were placed, stored or deposited.
The researchers warn that interpreting these practices in light of contemporary values can be misleading. Seven thousand years ago, bodies, death and rituals were embedded in very different meaning systems of the current ones.
Future work will use isotopic and DNA analyzes to try to determine the geographic origin, diet and possible family relationships between individuals.
