Herxheim

The site lies at the western edge of Herxheim bei Landau, in the Südliche Weinstraße district of Rhineland-Palatinate. It was a settlement of the Linear Pottery culture, enclosed on three sides by ditches built from long, narrow pits joined into interrupted rings. Datable finds from the settlement pits indicate continuous occupation from the Flomborn phase, from about 5300 BC, to the end of the Linear Pottery culture in the Palatinate shortly before 5000 BC, with the site as a whole dated to between about 5300 and 4950 BC. The settlement inside the enclosure covered up to six hectares and was badly eroded. Shortly before or during the final phase of the culture the function of the place evidently changed, and it is that last stretch of occupation, which the excavators call the ritual phase, that produced the human bone deposits.

The site came to attention in 1996, when local people reported bones, among them human skulls, on the ground of a construction project on the western edge of the village. The rescue dig ran from 1996 to 1999 under Annemarie Häußer, and parts of the site were destroyed by the building work; Häußer died in an accident in September 2002, ending her planned study of the pottery. From autumn 2003 Andrea Zeeb-Lanz, the regional archaeologist for the district, coordinated a team to evaluate the material, funded by the German Research Foundation from 2004 to 2011, and further excavations followed from 2005 to 2008 under Fabian Haack on a smaller part of the settlement and its ditches. Two exploratory trenches cut on the eastern side in 2010, funded by the National Geographic Society and filmed for the documentary Lost Cannibals of Europe, found a ditch terminal in the southern trench only, which suggests the ditches were never closed and the settlement was unenclosed on that side.

Concentrations of finds lay irregularly along the ditches, made up mainly of human bone broken small, together with skull vaults and a few complete skulls, mixed with sherds of pottery, destroyed stone tools and smashed querns, and animal bones. Counting by minimum number of individuals gave at least 500 people, from newborns to the elderly, and because only part of the enclosure has been excavated a total of more than 1000 is assumed. About 500 bowl-shaped skull caps were recovered, along with fragments of further ones. The deposits fall within the roughly 50 years assigned to the latest phase of the culture, dated variously to the 51st or the 50th century BC.

The bones carry numerous deliberate cuts: at joint ends and at the attachments of muscles and tendons, indicating dismemberment; flat, narrow cuts on the crown of the skull and above the ears, indicating removal of the whole scalp; short scraping marks, pointing to careful defleshing; and marks attributed to cutting out the tongue. After the limbs were removed and the spine cut out to open the ribcage, the parts were stripped of soft tissue and the bones broken into small fragments, up to 40 splinters from a single long bone being no rarity. Faces and skull bases were struck off with stone axes, leaving the skull cap, which was worked into a bowl. A study published in 2006 established that the breakage was peri-mortem, and the precision of the cuts and blows suggests that most were made soon after death, indicating defleshing and dismemberment rather than the killing itself. Burn marks appear on skull caps, long bones and individual jaws, and ash and burnt material were recorded in the inner ditch.

The origins of the dead are not settled. The pottery deposited with the bones represents at least eight regional styles of the latest Linear Pottery culture, including vessels from as far off as the lower Elbe valley, 400 kilometres away, and clay analysis shows that pots in non-local styles were not made in the Palatinate. Strontium isotope analysis of almost 100 individuals found that around 90 had not been born or raised at Herxheim, with values pointing to uplands of granite or gneiss for which evidence of Linear Pottery settlement is lacking. DNA analysis of the same teeth places them within the known range of Linear Pottery people rather than among Mesolithic populations. The discrepancy between the isotopic and the genetic results is so far unexplained, and the identity of the dead is unknown.

Interpretations have changed repeatedly since 1996. Jörg Orschiedt and Miriam N. Haidle, who studied the human remains from the rescue excavation, argued for secondary burial: relatives buried elsewhere had been exhumed, their bones broken at Herxheim and deposited again. On that reading, published in 2006, the site was a regional mortuary centre to which human remains, pottery and flint were transported, and a projected total of 1,300 to 1,500 individuals ruled out a local graveyard. Sky burial, in which a corpse is exposed and many bones carried off by scavengers, was also considered.

A study published in 2009 rejected both in favour of cannibalism, and the disagreement has not closed since. Bruno Boulestin, the anthropologist who examined the bones, supported by Anne-Sophie Coupey, holds that the treatment of the bodies is closely comparable to the butchery of animals for food, citing bones crushed for marrow, scrape marks inside marrow cavities, chewing, and the under-representation of spongy bone, and regards mass cannibalism at Herxheim as proven. A detailed study by the excavators in 2015 put the total at more than 1000 individuals, all butchered and eaten, more than a third of them juveniles from newborns to teenagers, with the bodies probably spit-roasted whole over open fires and the skulls processed into cups. They further argue that the remains entered the ditches within a few days of death, while soft tissue still held parts of the bodies together, which in their view rules out both secondary and sky burial. Other archaeologists have continued to maintain that the evidence better fits reburial after dismemberment and the removal of flesh.

A third reading accepts that people were killed as part of the rituals but not that they were eaten, applying to Herxheim the concept of extreme processing, introduced by American anthropologists for Anasazi finds in the American Southwest, under which the reduction of bodies to fragments no longer identifiable as human, the standardised production of skull bowls and the matching destruction of valuable pottery and tools served as a socially binding act, accompanied by feasting but not on human flesh. Whether the dead were sacrificial victims at all remains contested. Two explanations have been offered for their varied origins: that warriors from the region raided other territories and brought captives back, or that the site was a major religious centre visited from far off, some of the visitors being killed there; in the second case the excavators still suspect the dead were brought as captives or slaves. Herxheim has been called a mass grave, but probably is not one in the ordinary sense, and one cannot properly speak there of actions within burial rituals. It differs on that count from the Linear Pottery finds at Wiederstedt, Talheim, Halberstadt and Kilianstädten, where victims of violence were left unceremoniously and not in the culture's usual burial position, and from Schletz in Lower Austria, where the dead in the ditch terminals are read as defenders of the settlement. No comparable find has been identified.