Violence in temperate Europe in the Neolithic period

Although violence in temperate Europe is well attested by osteological evidence for the Neolithic period, warfare is another matter. Evidence for massacres of men, women and children early in the Neolithic period suggests that in temperate Europe hostility between foragers and food-producers may have occasionally erupted into violence. An atrocity at Talheim, in southern Germany, left the skeletons of thirty- four individuals, most of them women and children, and all apparently killed by an axe. Another massacre, at Schletz bei Asparn, in Austria, claimed at least fifty victims, of both sexes and all ages. These atrocities occurred between 5000 and 4500 bc and the victims are identified with the Linearbandkeramik culture of central Europe.¹¹⁷ The bow and arrow were of course used most often in hunting, but osteological evidence leaves no doubt that humans were also targets.¹¹⁸ For the British isles, R. J. Mercer concluded that “the archaeological evidence for warfare is generally clearer during the Neolithic than at any time in Britain prior to the Roman period.”¹¹⁹ Violence continued throughout the Neolithic period. According to Jean Guilaine and Jean Zammit, “the vast majority of human remains bearing projectile-inflicted injuries date from the later stages of the Neolithic, between 3000 and 2000 bce.” That datum is qualified, as the authors concede, by the fact that in temperate Europe archaeologists have found far more graves from the third millennium bc than from the fifth or fourth.¹²⁰

Grim evidence for violent death in the Corded Ware culture came recently with the discovery, in 2005, of four graves at Eulau, in Germany’s Sachsen-Anhalt state.¹²¹ In the graves were thirteen skeletons, with cranial trauma showing that most of the victims were struck from behind with battle-axes as they were trying to escape from their attackers. The victims were two men (one of whom had a flint arrowhead imbedded in a lumbar vertebra), three women, and eight children, ranging in age from 1 to 9 years old. It is obvious that late in the third millennium bc a settlement near Eulau was devastated by a raid and a massacre.

The Corded Ware culture of the third millennium bc has often been called the “Battle-Axe culture,” because a battle-axe was commonly placed in the grave of a male (in the burials at Eulau, stone axes were placed with the bodies of the men and boys). We must assume that in the vast Corded Ware culture, which stretched from near Nizhny Novgorod (far to the east of Moscow) westward to the Rhine, a man frequently went about with a battle-axe suspended at his side. Wielded with one hand, the “battle-axe” surely was used more often against animals than against humans, and that it was intended for battles has never been clear and—I suggest—is not likely. Until we have evidence to the contrary, that is, the “battle- axe” should despite its name be regarded as a personal weapon rather than as a weapon designed for battle. The axe had a stone head, often in the shape of a boat, with a shaft-hole for attachment to a wooden handle that was perhaps 40 or 50 cm in length. However useful they may have been for personal defense, neither the axe nor any other weapon available in the Corded Ware or the Beaker culture seems to have been designed for combat: designed, that is, for a confrontation with opponents who were also prepared and equipped for combat. The dagger would have been no more effective in combat than the axe. Through the third millennium bc daggers were usually made of flint: a flint 20 or 25 cm long was on one end shaped into a pointed and sharpened blade, and on the other end was rounded into a handle and then wrapped with osiers impressed into a coat of tar.¹²²

Because of the ubiquitous axes, the Corded Ware culture has for a long time been thought of as warlike. Gimbutas imagined men of the Corded Ware (as well as the Bell Beaker) culture as “vagabondic horse riders and archers” who were frequently at war.¹²³ Evidence for war, however, has not been found.¹²⁴ Like mainland Greece and unlike the Near East, temperate Europe was in the Neolithic period at neither the state nor the urban level. The siege warfare that characterized the Near East could obviously not have happened here. Homicide was of course a danger, and from time to time there were sudden raids and sneak attacks on villagers. Skirmishes, with exchanges of arrows shot from self bows may also have occurred, because arrowheads are often found as grave goods in the Beaker period and some men were buried with arrowheads lodged in their vertebrae. Many Europeans died a violent death in the Neolithic period, but it is likely that most of the trauma found on skeletons resulted not from combat between armed opponents, but from crime, personal revenge, and the massacre of people who were unsuspecting and unarmed.