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Stone age Cannibals? Examining the 7000-year-old ritual site of Herxheim – With Dr Andrea Zeeb-Lanz - S2E2
395 Plays8 months ago
The stone age site of Herxheim in Western Germany is counted among the most important and at the same time enigmatic prehistoric localities of Europe, because in the ditches surrounding an Early Neolithic settlement, the skeletal remains of hundreds of individuals were found. But these were not proper burials, as the bones were smashed beyond recognition and the skulls shaped to bowl-like artefacts. Soon after this discovery, the possibility of ritualized mass cannibalism was debated, as all the evidence hints to complex ceremonies taking place at this site. To find out more, I had a discussion with my friend Dr. Andrea Zeeb-Lanz on this episode of archaeological context.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Archaeology Podcast Network
00:00:00
Speaker
You're listening to the Archaeology Podcast Network.
00:00:19
Speaker
Welcome back everyone to another episode of Archaeological Context.
Herxheim Site Overview and Enigmatic Findings
00:00:24
Speaker
In this installment we focus on the Stone Age site of Herzheim, which is located in western Germany and was discovered in 1996.
00:00:34
Speaker
It is counted among the most important and at the same time enigmatic prehistoric localities of Europe. Because in the ditches surrounding an early Neolithic settlement, the skeletal remains of hundreds of individuals were found. But these were not proper burials, as the bones were smashed beyond recognition and the skulls shaped to bowl-like artifacts.
00:01:01
Speaker
Soon after this discovery, the possibility of ritualized mass cannibalism was debated, as all the evidence hints to complex ceremonies taking place at this site. To find out more about what may actually took place at this site, I had a discussion with my friend Dr. Andrea C. Blantz. She is leading the Herxheim research project, and here's already a small extract of our conversation.
00:01:30
Speaker
Every other proof, for example, Grenoble-Eston says it's proof factually that there was cannibalism, mass cannibalism in Herx. I mean, that is not true because we don't have any factual truth. We know they cut off the meat from these persons.
Significance of Herxheim's Settlements
00:01:44
Speaker
We don't know why they did it. And we don't know what happened to this.
00:02:10
Speaker
Before we enter the debate around potential cannibalism, let me give you a quick overview about this archaeological site.
Excavation Revelations at Herxheim
00:02:19
Speaker
Traces of multiple settlements belonging to the linear pottery culture were discovered during construction work in the village of Herzheim, located in western Germany, some 60 kilometers or 35 miles northwest of the city of Stuttgart.
00:02:37
Speaker
The so-called linear pottery culture, often referred to simply as LBK from its German name Linearbandkeramik, is named after its typical pottery decoration with band patterns, meaning spiral or angular lines winding around the ceramic vessels.
00:02:58
Speaker
The Neolithic settlement at Herzheim covers an area of about 4 hectares and was inhabited by an estimated 100 people per generation from around 5300 to 4950 BCE.
00:03:14
Speaker
And initially, the archaeologists did not expect any great surprises when the excavation of the site was started in 1996. As known from other linear pottery culture settlements, two parallel ditches surrounded the village.
00:03:31
Speaker
However, over the course of the excavation, the finds in these ditches proved to be so spectacular that more intensive research seemed necessary. And since 2004, a team of dozens of interdisciplinary researchers examined the site, with large-scale excavations following between 2005 and 2008.
00:03:56
Speaker
But now to the reason why Herxheim has become such an enigmatic site for prehistoric Europe.
Ritualistic Processing of Human Remains
00:04:03
Speaker
As mentioned in the introduction, during these excavations human remains of at least 500 individuals were detected and it is suggested that the total number could be even around 1000 people buried in the ditches surrounding this LBK settlement.
00:04:22
Speaker
But as these bones were commingled and smashed beyond recognition, it was evident that they do not represent proper burials. The distribution of the bones and other objects rather indicated that they were simply dumped into the trenches and then covered with soil. These human remains found in the ditches show numerous traces of specific cuts, consistent with the butchering or processing of meat.
00:04:51
Speaker
For example, cuts at joint ends and at attachment points for muscles and tendons on the longbones.
Strontium Isotope Analysis and Non-Local Individuals
00:05:00
Speaker
Specific cuts on the skull even indicate the stripping of the entire scalp.
00:05:06
Speaker
Further traces like short scraping marks on long bones and other body parts suggest a careful removing of the flesh from these bones. These findings sparked heated debates among experts, with one theory being the possibility of cannibalism.
00:05:25
Speaker
To get to the bottom of the mystery of what this site really represents, a team of archaeologists and anthropologists meticulously studied the bones. Their analysis involved a combination of traditional osteological methods as well as stable isotope analysis and ancient DNA sequencing.
00:05:48
Speaker
And to focus on one example, the strontium isotope analysis from human teeth yielded very interesting results. From almost 100 sampled individuals, about 90 proved to be from, quote, strangers.
00:06:05
Speaker
meaning they were not born or raised in the area surrounding Herzheim. Because as we covered more extensively in the last season of this podcast, isotopes are absorbed into the body with the food the individuals consumed, and isotopes have a very characteristic ratio depending on the landscape one has lived.
00:06:28
Speaker
This analysis additionally revealed high strontium contents in the vast majority of the samples, indicating that these individuals, who originated from further away, apparently grew up in low mountain ranges. This fact led the researchers to even more open questions, which we will later discuss with the guest of today's podcast.
00:06:53
Speaker
However, the highly standardized and repetitive treatment of the individuals processed at Herzheim, meaning the dismemberment of the bodies, fleshing of the skeletons, systematic crushing of the bones or shaping of the skulls into bowl-like artifact,
Ritualized Acts and Destruction Evidence
00:07:11
Speaker
places the activities at this site in the realm of highly ritualized acts. Further evidence for complex rituals taking place at Herzheim are indicated by the other objects that were found in the trenches, all valuable items such as special flint, millstones and pottery objects. And like the human bones, these objects have been systematically destroyed.
00:07:40
Speaker
Focusing on the ceramics, the pottery shards discovered in the ditches next to the human remains indicated to represent at least eight different regional styles of late linear pottery cultures, dating to around 5000 to 4900 BCE.
00:07:59
Speaker
This means that the decorations and shapes of some vessels indicate an origin from as far away as 500 km from Herzheim. And indeed, clay analysis revealed that the vessels decorated in foreign regional styles were not made of local clay found around Herzheim.
00:08:21
Speaker
This indicates a far-flung exchange network, and it was suggested that the settlement communities integrated in this network probably sent delegations to communal ritual activities taking place at Herzheim, and also brought vessels in their native decoration style.
Herxheim as a Trading or Pilgrimage Site?
00:08:42
Speaker
And so, as the stable isotope analysis and the pottery shards indicated the presence of individuals from various distant places, this raised new questions about the nature of Herxheim and its role in the broader Neolithic society.
00:08:59
Speaker
Was it a trading center, a pilgrimage site, or something else entirely? As the evidence continued to unfold, some experts revisited the possibility of ritual cannibalism taking place at Herzheim. Ritual cannibalism has been documented in various cultures throughout history, often associated with complex beliefs, where bones could have been ritually processed and deposited as part of communal practices.
00:09:29
Speaker
However, the fact that the bones were cut into very small pieces and the skulls taken apart in a certain way could speak rather against cannibalism and more to so-called ritualized destruction.
00:09:43
Speaker
In summary, Herxheim appears to stand alone and without comparison in the early Neolithic or linear pottery culture world, given the sheer number and extreme manipulations of remains of around 1.000 individuals. As many questions surrounding the finds of this 7.000 year old site remain open, I am very happy to discuss some of them with today's guest, Dr.
Interview with Dr. Andrea Zeplant on Herxheim's Chronology
00:10:11
Speaker
Andrea Zeplant.
00:10:22
Speaker
Okay, Andrea, thank you very much for joining us. First off, do you think the human bones and other destroyed artifacts discovered in Herxheim represent one large ritual event that took place? So a singular event or rather multiple events taking place over a longer period of time, maybe some decades or even centuries?
00:10:47
Speaker
I'm definitely sure that it is not only one event because you have to imagine we are talking about around a thousand persons which were somehow brought to death and then they were cut up into pieces and they were processed very
00:11:02
Speaker
carefully and the meat was cut often and the bones of most of these individuals were smashed into small pieces and the heads were processed so that only the collards like a sort of artificial object like a bowl remained and it's not really imaginable how this could happen in one session you could say in one ceremony or a ritual meeting it would take I don't know weeks or months to do so
00:11:31
Speaker
We are pretty sure that several events took place and we have concentrations of bone material and pottery which are overlapping sort of. So we have no chance by doing C14 or so to decide whether there is a big
00:11:48
Speaker
amount of time between these two episodes where two of these concentrations are overlapping. It could be weeks, it could be months, it could be some years. We know that definitely decades are not a question because we have the pottery which really is very well
00:12:08
Speaker
researched in the LBK and we can date it to a small period of about 50 years at the end of the sixth century, maybe 60 years, maybe 40, but it's not definitely longer, that is very well researched and we are sure of that. So we have a sort of dating by the pottery, it's the end of the LBK, the end of the sixth millennium
00:12:27
Speaker
But it could have taken some years, so you could have 10 ritual meetings, you could have 5 or 20. I think it's something between 10 or 20, if you think of 1000 persons which have to be processed like that.
00:12:41
Speaker
So, but we can't really say for sure. I'm really waiting for natural scientific methods, you know, that we could do some sort of tree ring dating with human bone material, with our other organic material. I'm sure something like that will come, but I have no idea when. So, we have to wait for new developments in the natural sciences, I think, to really answer this question. At the moment, we can say it's not longer than 50 years,
00:13:07
Speaker
Probably it took place several times, but not in one event. Okay.
Exclusion of Epidemic Scenarios
00:13:14
Speaker
Okay. Thank you. And speaking about the human remains, I was wondering, do we actually know something about the cause of death of these individuals deposited in the ditches? So if and how they were killed or were they, for example, already dead from diseases prior to being ritually processed at the site?
00:13:39
Speaker
I start with the first part of your question. We have a number of traumas on the skull caps, which we have, but these traumas are all healed. You can see it very well. At least some months or even years, we have some blows with stone edges and
00:14:00
Speaker
some blunt instruments or weapons were used. And that is something which is not so astonishing. We have it in LBK graves as well, that people, you know, have cuts on the head or so, or blows, signs of blows on the heads. So there is some violence, some
00:14:20
Speaker
aggression as it is in every society since people lived in smaller or bigger groups, we have to admit that. So these blows on the head.
00:14:31
Speaker
are not the causes of death. And the remains, the rest of the skeleton, the pulse training skeleton is normally you have to imagine that cut into small pieces from four to six centimeters long. So you can never say if you have a broken rib, for example, or smashed TBR. So you can never say this is a blow from violence to kill this person. Or this is the blow because all the wounds were cut into small pieces. So the cause of death, we have no idea about that.
00:15:00
Speaker
the question of a disease where, you know, lots of people died. How Bruno Ballista, our anthropologist, wrote in his publication, I found that very good, he said, we have to give these people some kind of, you know,
00:15:19
Speaker
Yeah, how to say, in German we say, just normal thinking. When they see that people fall like flies and die like flies, 20 of them, 50, 30 or 100 of them, they would never occupy themselves. And for such a long time, they would know that is something which is not good. Everybody's dying. So we better put them into grave as quickly as possible, agree with them.
00:15:43
Speaker
So, but they, you know, they really take time to occupy themselves with cutting up these people, with taking off the flesh, and they wouldn't do it if this was really a disease. So I think we can exclude a disease. Actually, I would do that. I can't, as I can, nobody can really say whether it was a disease or not, but there are many good reasons against this case. So I think they were brought to death.
00:16:13
Speaker
somehow you know if you take a knife and give them just yeah put it into their heart or so you will never see it on the bones even if you have a cut mark on the rib or on the sternum or so it could always come from cutting them up or taking off we can't differentiate it okay yeah
Mystery of the Individuals' Origins Through Isotope Analysis
00:16:37
Speaker
The isotope analysis revealed that a larger part of these individuals probably grew up in low mountain ranges. What does this signify for you, or why was this fact actually so remarkable? It was not only remarkable, it was so astonishing that we just repeated the first isotope analysis because we thought that was mistaken, the laboratory also.
00:17:04
Speaker
And it turned out that these isotope analyses were really on the point, the second time, on the same tools, we had the same results. But the ABK is one of the best researched culture in the prehistory of Europe. And we have thousands of excavated sites and hundreds of cemeteries.
00:17:27
Speaker
But we have found, until now, no traces of really settlement activity in the low mountain ranges, which I can understand very well, because these are farmers. They need planes for growing cereals, growing crops and other vegetables, whatever they need per pasture for their
00:17:45
Speaker
cows and so on. So it wouldn't be feasible to go into the mountains because we have really isotope data which show that these are the higher parts even of low mountain ranges. So where you have really mountainous areas where you can't really settle for farming. And as we
00:18:06
Speaker
actually don't have traces of normal LBK people in the mountains. These are not normal LBK people, although these persons which were born and grew up in the lower mountain ranges, they have the DNA, the typical haplogroups of LBK people. We have made so many analysis, we can compare it. We have no Mesolithic people, so these are not the last Mesolithics who were just taken prisoner and they can kill and
00:18:35
Speaker
process them. It's a mystery actually. We don't know the identity of these large groups of people because if you imagine even in grown-ups we measure the values of their birth in the first years of living. So they lived in the mountains but a just-born baby doesn't live alone in the mountains. It would never survive. So we have parents
00:18:59
Speaker
So this group is much bigger than just these 900 or 1000 persons, which we are talking about. Yeah. That's so astonishing because we have no traces up to enough. Although naturally it's much more difficult.
00:19:13
Speaker
culture we really find traces in the mountainous areas because nobody's building they don't have many excavation activity not really any research in the mountainous areas but if there were larger settlements of some sort we would have found something now I'm rather sure so at the moment we have a community or many communities several communities
00:19:37
Speaker
who obviously lived in the mountains, but we don't really know what they did there, who they are. They have ancestors which are the same of the normal LBK people in the plains, but they are not visible archaeologically. Hopefully in the future, yeah, we will discover some sites. We have so many enigmas, sorry, at her time, which I have to be solved. Some of them will never be solved. We will never know why.
00:20:05
Speaker
They had this idea without any tradition for these rituals or so. You would have to ask, interview some of them, but that wouldn't be possible, actually. But I think the identity of the dead, for example, all the time spent, when this took place, all these questions, and there are quite a number of further questions, I hope they will be solved in the future. So it always stays interesting in her, so I'm never going to say we can close the book. That was the last chapter, and now we know everything.
00:20:36
Speaker
Yeah, maybe staying with that. Finally, one question concerning the debate around this possibility of ritualized mass cannibalism.
Debate on Ritualized Mass Cannibalism
00:20:50
Speaker
I'm not familiar with this topic at all. So I was just wondering, is there actually any way, like any type of analysis for us to find out if human flesh was consumed?
00:21:04
Speaker
Yeah, there is one real factual possibility that is if you have coprolites. You know, in coprolites there's a certain enzyme, or I don't know the English word, it's a certain stuff that is only in the muscular flesh of humans.
00:21:21
Speaker
Cows also have it on pigs or so, but it's just different. So we can really analyze and say this person who produced this coprolite has eaten human flesh. We never have coprolites in mineral sites. That's the problem. We never have LBK coprolites and we don't have any in herbs.
00:21:41
Speaker
Every other proof, for example, Grenoble-Eston says it's proof factually that there was cannibalism, mass cannibalism in Herx. I mean, that is not true, because we don't have any factual truth. We know they cut off the meat from these persons. We don't know why they did it. And we don't know what happened to this meat. And it's masses of meat. I mean, if you say we had this ritual 10 times or 15 times, so you're talking for 100
00:22:11
Speaker
really took pains to find out how many eatable material 100 persons give you, you know, so grown ups and children make sort of an average calculation there. And from 100 persons to get more than three and a half
00:22:30
Speaker
1000 kilo of meat and 1500 kilo of fat. And I'm not talking about the innards and stuff like that. So who should eat it all? Because they don't really have methods to, you know, conserve it over a long time. Yeah. So it would have to be eaten in a very short time.
00:22:50
Speaker
And that would mean that the whole LBK community from Europe must have come to these ceremonies to eat these masses of meat. And then Bruno says they even gnawed on the small bones of the fingers, you know, as a sort of after dish or whatever, to get out the what's called the material inside the bones. The bone marrow?
00:23:18
Speaker
bone marrow, yes. And because we have these sort of destroyed ends, the epitheuses of the Phalangus, they are destroyed. But you have many reasons to destroy these. I asked quite a number of anthropologists and they said, well, that just happens because it's just
00:23:37
Speaker
spongy material that gets destroyed by itself. So it's no proof that anybody tried after eating 3,500 kilo of meat, tries to get the marrow out of the small bones from the fingers. For me, it's sort of ridiculous to assume this. And we don't have a real proof for the hypothesis of cannibalism, but it stays as one hypothesis, which can't really be proved. I can't prove that it's just a ritual
00:24:07
Speaker
a meeting where they had a feast, where they ate meat, but from cattle or other animals. And maybe they dug holes or in parts of these ditches, the meat was deposited.
00:24:25
Speaker
Yeah, at other places than the bones, this is possible, but we never try to analyze the filling from the digits. So we still have one third of the digits. It's not yet touched by archaeologists. And there are many questions which we could say, OK, we can try these questions in the part of the site we still have in the Earth. I'm looking forward to the new discoveries around this site.
00:24:55
Speaker
Yes, me too. And there's still quite a lot of material to be
Ongoing Research at Herxheim
00:25:00
Speaker
analyzed. For example, at the moment we are working, my colleague Eva Hoisler, mainly together with me is working on the pottery to find out whether all these different regional styles, the pottery with these regional style ornamentation really came from Bohemia, from Northern Hesse and other places. And that's something we really want to definitely find out in the next few months.
00:25:25
Speaker
that will solve a number of questions, who really took part in these ceremonies, because we don't have the actors, we just have the victims, you know. Maybe that we even have some of the actors, but that is not really, it's work in progress, actually. I'm working on the whole skeletons at the moment together with an anthropologist, we just have 12.
00:25:47
Speaker
um whole skeletons some of them look like normal burials but there are a number of interesting details on these skeletons as well that's where we're working on perhaps we even can you know grab some of these actors who sort of died during the rituals and were buried there but yeah these are further things which have to be
00:26:10
Speaker
examined. Looking forward to it. Thank you very much for these interesting insights, Andrea, around the site of Helksheim. Thank you very much. You're welcome, and I'm happy that you choose me for a podcast interview. Of course.
00:26:36
Speaker
Alright, that's it for this episode.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:26:40
Speaker
One could speak a lot longer or highlight many more interesting results from the research of such an enigmatic prehistoric site, but I hope you enjoyed this small insight into the 7000-year-old ritual site of Herxheim.
00:26:55
Speaker
Thanks again to Dr. Andrea Zeblans for giving us her interesting insights, and if you enjoyed it as well, please follow and subscribe to this podcast. You can even support it over on Patreon. I hope you will tune in in about two weeks for another edition of Archaeological Context with Dr. Noah.
00:27:29
Speaker
This has been a presentation of the Archaeology Podcast Network. Visit us on the web for show notes and other podcasts at www.archpodnet.com. Contact us at chrisatarchaeologypodcastnetwork.com.