Unraveling ancestry, kinship, and violence in a Late Neolithic mass grave:
In 2011, archaeological excavations near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland uncovered a ca. 5,000-y-old mass grave…associated with the Globular Amphora culture and containing the remains of 15 men, women, and children who had been killed, but carefully buried with rich grave goods…Closer study of the skeletons…revealed that the individuals had all been killed by blows to the head, possibly during a raid on their settlement.
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Interestingly, the older males/fathers are mostly missing from the grave, suggesting that it might have been them who buried their kin…
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Although it is impossible to identify the culprits of the massacre that took place at Koszyce around 2880–2776 BCE, it is interesting to note that it occurred right around the time when the Corded Ware complex started to spread rapidly across large parts of Central Europe, and it seems plausible that the group from Koszyce fell victim to some violent intergroup conflict related to the territorial expansion of Corded Ware groups or another competing group in the area. If the general interaction between Globular Amphora people and neighboring, steppe-related cultures (including early Corded Ware) was primarily hostile, it would explain why Globular Amphora individuals carry no steppe ancestry and, in part, why Europe experienced such a dramatic reduction in Neolithic genomic ancestry at this time
If you read the supplements you note that they suggest the blows to the head were struck with stone axes. The killings were like executions since there is no resistance as suggested by cuts to the upper body (where people are resisting). Additionally, the one woman who is not part of the kin group was killed somewhat differently and more deliberately.
Whatever the real story, I want to note that when the Corded Ware arrived in Northern Europe they were often buried with mace pendants. What do you do with maces?
I’ve read War Before Civilization. I am aware that the Neolithic groups were quite violent. I am aware that the violence continued after the Corded Ware. But, reading about the Corded Ware reminds me a lot about reading about the Mongols during the time of Genghis Khan. They were effective.
As you’ve noted at Brown Pundits, the Corded Ware men likely killed the fathers, husbands, brothers and sons of Neolithic women, while taking many of the women as their own, and securing enough cooperation from those Neolithic women for them to continue to produce pottery for their new families and to give birth to and raise a large share of Corded Ware children.
I’m at something of a loss to imagine the relationships between those Corded Ware men and their Neolithic wives, and to imagine the emotions they felt for each other.
Certainly, this is hardly unprecedented. Conquering men who kill another tribe’s men and take their women is a repeating trope in history.
Probably the most recent notable case is that of the Conquistadors encountering the indigenous people of what is now Latin America. The Biblical Hebrew people depict themselves in this role in the Hebrew Bible books of Numbers and Judges. But the American example is still too unfamiliar from the sources that I know, and the Biblical account too skeletal, to really understand what a process like this was like for those involved.
I’d welcome suggestions of richer fictional accounts that attempt to wrestle with the question of what life would have been like for the generation of conquest, and the first two or three generations afterward, in this kind of event, to gain a better feel for it.
“…agricultural words in Germanic languages come from a pre-Indo-European substrate”
>>> in plain English – ‘agricultural’, so as almost all words from other disciplines were taken by Yamnaya people from Vinca civilisation people. For example, ‘metallurgy’ words, because we can see the stone maces, not metal axes, which were later taken from Vinca people to conduct a genocide on them. I am still waiting to see sc. “Indo-European substrate”, i.e. Yamnaya linguistic legacy.
RK: “The GAC culture seemed to be dominated by individuals descended mostly from “Early European Farmers” (EEF), and on a genome-wide level … almost exactly the same as the Neolithic people of Ireland, thousands of miles to the west. Genetically, and judging by the pigmentation loci, physically, the GAC’s closest analogs today are probably the people of Sardinia, who have the largest fraction of EEF ancestry among modern Europeans. Because EEF fractions are still rather high in Southern Europe, the late Neolithic people of much of Northern Europe are genetically more similar to modern Southern Europeans than they are to later Northern Europeans who succeeded them.”
>>> these ‘modern Southern Europeans’ are Serbs, descendants of Vinca people (now 40% I2), who migrated from Vinca to British Isles and Scandinavia several 000 years before Yamnaya or escaped as far as Sardinia (and Carpathian) after their arrival. The mainstream says that sc. ‘Slavics’ fell from Mars and came to Balkan in the 7th c.AC.
@ohwilleke
As far as available accounts of parallel experiences, I am aware of some accounts of White women taken as captives by Commanche in particular. Might start with Empire of the Summer Moon by Wynne. There may also be some accounts of White women captives in Ottoman harems available. Off the top of my English-speaking American head…
@ohwilleke: But the American example is still too unfamiliar from the sources that I know, and the Biblical account too skeletal, to really understand what a process like this was like for those involved.
This being the internet and all, I cannot tell whether your choice of the word “skeletal” was deliberate. Any accounts derived from the late Neolithic grave near Koszyce would necessarily rely on evidence that is too skeletal to really understand etc., etc. The Biblical account is more mythical, not being based on archaeology.
“This being the internet and all, I cannot tell whether your choice of the word “skeletal” was deliberate.”
Not deliberate in that sense. At most a Freudian slip.
“Any accounts derived from the late Neolithic grave near Koszyce would necessarily rely on evidence that is too skeletal to really understand etc., etc.”
Absolutely.
“The Biblical account is more mythical, not being based on archaeology.”
Like a lot of Bronze and Iron Age written accounts, I consider the books of Numbers and Judges in the Hebrew Bible to be “legendary history”. Unlike the early portions of Genesis, which are pretty much pure invention, these books, probably contain a mix of historical reality and human invention. (The timing of this genre of writing in this era may have something to do with an insufficient pool of literate writers to maintain distinct fiction and non-fiction genres and the necessity of making accounts that can be maintained via oral history interesting enough to be worth the multi-generational bother and burden of doing so).
Another type example of legendary history is the Illiad, which recounts a historical battle of Troy which was subsequently found to have a historical foundation minus many of its more fantastic elements. The Rig Veda is a third.
I’d prefer to rely on purely secular non-fiction documentary accounts of that time period, but we don’t have any.
Also, because these accounts are among the least flattering parts of the legendary history of the Hebrews (in which they depict themselves engaged in genocide), and because the relevant stories within these books are particularly light on miracles and supernatural happenings, and because they correspond to processes observed in the anthropological record in many places at similar times in similar circumstances (with culturally distinct, extended family clan/tribally organized “barbarian” herders from the periphery coming in and conquering farmers), there is good reason to think that these are closer to non-fiction on a invention to documentary recounting spectrum than many other Hebrew Bible stories, even though they are likely exaggerated somewhat (critical readings of these books have noted that despite the Hebrews supposedly wiping out pre-existing populations in large swaths of the Southern Levant, remnants of these people nonetheless show up later on in the same Hebrew Bible accounts).
Informing our understanding of archaeology and pre-history with the oldest available oral histories and written accounts is a time honored methodology in anthropology, and while we would err by taking these accounts as literal truth or failing to consider the perspectives, purposes, and biases of the authors, ancient oral and written accounts also provide credible insights into the purpose and meaning behind archaeological relics and structures and human remains that would otherwise be left to speculation alone.
The same methods, for example, in an anthropology context with much less Western Christian baggage, have been used to gain insight from modern Puebloan folklore and Native American religion regarding the purpose of the ubiquitous structures in the American Southwest known as “kivas” created by the Ancient Puebloans f.k.a. the Anasazi, a civilization that itself has perished.
Sounds like they were helped by a Plague outbreak as well, that came with the Yamnaya. I wonder how many of the women they took as wives were prisoners, and how many were survivors and widows.
On a side-note, it’s fascinating how closely and presumably unintentionally George RR Martin got to this with his backstory for A Song of Ice and Fire. Only no equivalent of a Northern king with the military might to slaughter any Yamna warlords that showed up on his doorstep, and post their heads on spikes along the borderland as a warning.
@ohwilleke:”because these accounts are among the least flattering parts of the legendary history of the Hebrews (in which they depict themselves engaged in genocide”
flattery is in the eye of the beholder. For all we know, these accounts are braggaddocio, akin to the scene on the Mississippi barge in Huck Finn where the brawlers boast of their past triumphs to put the fear of G-d in their opponent.
There are symptomatic attempts (even DA) to minimize the atrocities of the first (of many) genocide in known history by introducing a special sort of selective plague which did not affect Yamnaya men and Vinca women than only 90+% of Vinca men. In fact, these abducted Vinca women were carriers of the Corded Ware culture and pottery, often associated to Yamnaya nomads. CW is actually a derivation of Vinca culture.
More importantly, Vinca women were guardians of the Vinca language which later influenced all Euro, Sanskrit and many Indic languages. The Yamnaya nomad language (sc. ‘Indo-European’ how is called by mainstream) did not have a vocabulary in any civilizational discipline which they faced upon arrival to Vinca.
It is up to geneticists to confirm or negate the assertion that Yamnaya even were not white and that today’s ‘westerners’ are white thanks to their foremothers from Vinca (what includes its Scandinavian branch which also had roots there).
PS: Iliad and Rg Veda came from the same cultural source. They have many similarities in story development (two brown pundits who already found some of them, Anan and Arjun, work on this project) and mythology. Rg and Veda are words from the above mentioned Vinca language so as the epic itself, while Iliad, which has nothing with Greeks, is translated into Greek in the 6th c.BC (actually the term ‘Greek’ did not yet exist at that time).
It is worth noticing one, for western readers less known fact (due to falsifications and censorship in English historiography, for example), equivalent to the description in the text “…the individuals had all been killed by blows to the head”, which actually gave the title of the text. During the WW2, about 1.5 million Serbs (coincidentally(?) surviving descendants of the victims in this story) were killed in the same way by Croats in several hundreds of places and villages, including the concentration camp, Jasenovac, where 700 000 Serbs (also some Jews and Gypsies) were killed. Not one was killed by bullet, all were killed by mallets and slaughtered. It seems that human consciousness changes even more slowly than genetics and evolution.
@ohwilleke : I’m at something of a loss to imagine the relationships between those Corded Ware men and their Neolithic wives, and to imagine the emotions they felt for each other.
I know I’ll get mocked for this, but I think this kind of situation is a lot more understandable under Julian Jaynes’ bicameral mind theory. With a lack of conscious interiority and narrative thought, this kind of violent “reorienting” of relationships would presumably be easier to mentally accommodate.
@ohwilleke : I’m at something of a loss to imagine the relationships between those Corded Ware men and their Neolithic wives, and to imagine the emotions they felt for each other.
There is much more in this and it is still unresearched. What modern ‘westerners’ would think and feel if they are aware that they are descendants of low culture nomad rapists and abducted Neo Euro women? This complex still does not have its name. The modern manifestation is a strong hatred towards their foremothers (!?), who gave them lives, language, (colour?) and culture and their lineage with ‘regular’ descendants. It seems, when explained, that it will be much more complex than Oedipus complex.
From the Intro text: “In 2011, archaeological excavations near the village of Koszyce in southern Poland uncovered a ca. 5,000-y-old mass grave…the individuals had all been killed by blows to the head, possibly during a raid on their settlement.”
Well, Koszyce (pronoun. Koshice) in Serbian means ‘little baskets’ (kosh-arka=basketball). So, how should we call these victims who are a little piece of much wider genocide? Of course, not ‘Polish’ (=’people from the field’), the name which came more than 3000 years after this killing. If we don’t know specifically the name of their tribe, maybe by their language what is a usual convention for this ‘pre-nation’ time. This language was not sc. ‘Indo-European’, because this was the language spoken by the murderers. This language already had alphabet for 2000 years before these intruders came from Russian steppes. This language had in its vocabulary words for farming, metallurgy, calendar, astronomy, architecture, building, pottery, jewellery, mythology…which intruders did not have. What would be the name of this language?