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Avrupa'da yamyamlık şoku!
Almanya'da 7 bin yıl öncesine ait bir toplu mezar bulundu.
Yaşlıları manhgalda kızartarak bebekleri de çorba yaparak yemişer...
Almanya'nın Herxheim köyünde çoğu çocuk ve kadın yaklaşık 500 kişinin yamyamlık kurbanı olduğu ortaya çıktı. Arkeologlar Almanya'da bulunan toplu mezarın cilalı taş devrinde Avrupa'da yamyamlık kültürü olduğunun kanıtı olduğunu belirtti.
Herxheim'daki kazı çalışmalarını yürüten Bruno Boulestin, toplu mezarda buldukları kemiklerin yamyamlığa kanıt olduğunu söyledi. Boulestin kemiklerde kesik ve kırık izleri olduğunu, kurbanların öldürülüp yenilirken kemiklerin kesilmiş olabileceğini belirtti.
http://haber.gazetevatan.com/Avrupada_yamyamlik_soku_/274834/30/Dunya
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Criteria for Cannibalism
December 6, 2009
You may have seen the news about the human remains from Herxheim, a 7,000-year-old Early Neolithic site in southwestern Germany. It’s an extraordinary site. Excavations in 1996-1999 and 2005-2008 uncovered rings of overlapping elongated pits around a small settlement dated to ca. 7,000 years ago. The pits have yielded remains of about 500 people, estimated at 1,000 if the site were fully excavated. The bones have a variety of cut marks and other indications of having been processed before burial.
Bruno Boulestin and colleagues have just published their interpretation of the site in the December issue of Antiquity, presenting “strong evidence that the site was dedicated to ritual activities in which cannibalism played an important part” (you can see a very brief abstract here and shell out a rather pricey £15 if you want to download a pdf of it). And Bruce Bower’s “Contested signs of mass cannibalism” for Science News gives a counter argument by Jörg Orschiedt and Miriam Noel Haidle, who studied the remains from the earlier excavation. They stick to their interpretation that the remains are of people who died elsewhere, who were dismembered and their bones defleshed and brought to Herxheim for burial.
Some background: Herxheim was a small village of farmers and herders in the Linear Pottery Culture (7,500-7,000 years ago). Pottery found with the bones spans at most about 50 years and includes some from as far as 400 km away. Science News gives some more details, but you can also read about the site and new interpretation, which was already covered by media back in March, here: “Germany’s stone age cannibalism” on the GuardianWeekly website, originally from Le Monde). It has additional quotes by Boulestin and site director Andrea Zeeb-Lanz and interesting bits like this: In some cases human skullcaps were arranged to form a nest, on which were scattered potsherds, broken adzes, shell jewelry, and dog foot and jaw bones.
The small size of the village (just a few houses), 50-year maximum time frame, and 1,000 defunct individuals are an odd set of facts. It seems unlikely that there were enough residents to produce that many dead people, so the dead or soon-to-be-dead were coming in from outside. The village was too small to be able to raid other sites and capture this many people, and Bruno and colleagues suggest they were perhaps slaves or war prisoners, who were brought to the site from other settlements to be sacrificed and consumed. Why? Bruno and Zeeb-Lanz believe the remains at Herxheim reflect a social-political crisis in central Europe, also reflected by massacres at three other sites about the same time. Zeeb-Lanz speculates that “perhaps they hoped to prevent the end of their world through some ceremony, of which cannibalism was just a part.”
I asked Notis Agelarakis, an anthropologist at Adelphi University, what he would look for in the bone assemblage from a site with suspected cannibalism. Here are a few of his many suggestions. Are there just cut marks, maybe an indication of defleshing only, or were certain bones crushed to facilitate marrow extraction? Do any of the fragments show ivory-like “pot varnish,” a polishing that can occur if bones are stirred around in a pot? Are there indications of thermal alteration, from discoloring to collagen deformation? Is there any preserved human fecal matter at the site? If so, the presence of the protein myoglobin could be definitive evidence. It is present in muscles, but not in the gut or internal organs, so if it is found in fecal matter it indicates consumption of human muscle tissue. Regarding the people, analysis of stable isotopes from teeth could show where they are coming from, say captives from another region. Then one has to do a study of demographics. Are these just males? Whether cannibalism or defleshing, if warriors you would expect a specific age cohort. Females as well? Subadults and children? Then it’s something else.
What evidence do the Herxheim bones offer? Isotope analysis is being done, so we should get some data about where the people came from and how that corresponds to the pottery from distant sites. Boulestin says that the damage to those bones is typical of animal butchery. But is that, or the removal of skullcaps, necessarily indicative of cannibalism? Orschiedt and Haidle suggest that the absence of jaws and skull bases from new Herxheim assemblage points to reburial, with those elements being ritually removed before the remains were placed in the pits. More convincing is the crushing of ends of limb bones and presence of scrape marks inside, indicating that marrow was removed. Boulestin also says that some chewing marks on the bones are likely from humans.
The jury may still be out on this case, but it brings into question the criteria used to determine whether or not cannibalism took place, recalling the debate about evidence for Anasazi cannibalism some years ago. It will be interesting to see how it plays out in terms of going from the physical evidence to human behaviors and beliefs.
http://archaeology.org/blog/?p=805
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Germany's stone age cannibalism
Viewpoint
Wednesday March 25th 2009
Tens of thousands of ancient human bones found in Germany suggest that victims were not killed just to satisfy hunger, writes Pierre Le Hir in Le Monde
Wednesday March 25th 2009
Lead article photo
Some skeletons show signs of cannibalism. Photograph: Nikolay Doychinov/Reuters
The German city of Speyer, in Rheinland-Palatinate, well known for its Romanesque cathedral, also boasts some much more macabre relics. A collection of skulls, shin bones and vertebrae might not seem unusual in an archaeology museum, but these particular remains are special. They all show signs of having been cut, scraped or broken, indicating that their owners were cannibalised.
"Look at these grooves, running from the base of the nose to the back of the neck, or here on the temples," says Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, the regional head of archaeology, holding up a skull. "The grooves show, beyond all possible doubt, that the flesh was torn off." It takes good eyesight to catch the fine parallel incisions made by the cutting edge of the flint stone. She then shows me a piece of thigh-bone the end of which has been crushed. Judging by the state of the bone tissue, it was smashed shortly after the victim was killed.
All these human remains were found at the stone-age site at Herxheim, near Speyer. About 7,000 years ago farmers, who grew wheat and barley, raised pigs, sheep and cattle, settled here, building a village of four to 12 houses, the post holes of which have survived. At the time the first farmer-stockherders were moving into Europe, supplanting their hunter-gatherer predecessors. The Herxheim settlers came from the north (between 5,400 and 4,950BC) and belonged to the Linear Pottery culture.
Two lines of ditches were dug around the settlement. They can't have been defensive because they weren't continuous. Nor were they intended for use as an ossuary, as the Linear Pottery people generally buried or burned their dead. However, during a rescue dig just before the area was developed as an industrial estate, in some of the ditches archaeologists uncovered tens of thousands of human bones.
During the first series of excavations, at the end of the 1990s, the numerous injuries visible on the skeletons were taken as evidence that the victims had been massacred. But in 2008 Bruno Boulestin, an anthropologist at Bordeaux University, examined the fragments recovered from one of the trenches, pointing out that nearly 2,000 samples belonged to fewer than 10 individuals.
"It is impossible to establish direct proof of cannibalism. But here we have systematic, repetitive gestures, which suggest that the bodies were eaten," says Boulestin. The marks of breaking, cutting, scraping and crushing indicate that the bodies were dismembered, the tendons and ligaments severed, the flesh torn off, the bones smashed. The vertebra were cut up to remove the ribs, just as butchers do today with loin chops. The tops of skulls were opened to extract the brains. Another telling clue is that there are proportionately fewer bones containing marrow, particularly vertebrae and short bones, suggesting they were set aside.
A quick investigation of the bones in neighbouring ditches showed that they had suffered the same fate. Extrapolating to the whole site, only half of which was excavated, about 1,000 people must have been butchered. There is no other example in prehistory of a mass grave of this size. "We are dealing with an exceptional event," says Zeeb-Lanz. Other cases of neolithic cannibalism have certainly been identified, in particular in France, at the caves at Fontbrégoua and Adaouste, near the south coast, or at Les Perrats, further west, but never on this scale.
What can this bloodbath mean? The potsherds found among the human remains suggest it must have occurred over a period of no longer than 50 years. There is nothing to imply the victims were killed for food. Only under extreme conditions would 100 or so farmers have been able to overcome about 10 times their number. The archaeologists have therefore concluded that this was some form of ritual killing. In some cases the tops of skulls were arranged to form a nest, scattered with pottery fragments, broken adzes, jewellery made of shells, the paws and jawbones of dogs.
There are two main types of ritual cannibalism, as the historian Jean Guilaine and palaeopathologist Jean Zammit explain in The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory. Exocannibalism targets people outside the community: by eating a conquered enemy the aim was not so much to feed on their body as to make them disappear for ever, appropriating their strength, energy and valour.
Endocannibalism, within a community, was a token of affection, the recognition of a bond that needed to be maintained. The scientists have also excluded this possibility, given the small size of the village. But wartime exocannibalism also seems unlikely, as it would have involved raids on remote communities to bring back hordes of prisoners and their pottery.
The team that discovered the site have come up with another hypothesis. Members of the Linear Pottery culture deliberately gathered here, with their prisoners and pottery, to take part in sacrificial ceremonies.
"At this time, the Linear Pottery culture was undergoing a crisis, which led to its disappearance," says Zeeb-Lanz. "Perhaps they hoped to prevent the end of their world through some ceremony, of which cannibalism was just a part."
http://www.guardianweekly.co.uk/?page=editorial&id=1000&catID=17
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