The first long-term war in Europe occurred 5,000 years ago, a millennium earlier than previously thought. This is the conclusion reached by a group of Spanish scientists after reanalyzing the remains of 338 individuals found in 1985 at the San Juan site before Portam Latinam, in Álava, the Basque Country. The results of the research, published this Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports, suggest that the burials correspond to a months-long war period that impacted the quality of life of the area's inhabitants.
The work “essentially suggests that we are facing a large-scale, organized and long-lasting conflict,” explains Teresa Fernández-Crespo, the anthropologist at the University of Valladolid who led the study, in conversation with La Vanguardia. “This represents a change in the vision of these populations, because this way of carrying out war requires a greater complexity of social hierarchy than is generally assumed for these groups,” she concludes.
The reanalysis has revealed that 78 of the 338 identified individuals had bone wounds, an unusually high number compared to other similar sites. Furthermore, most of them occurred in men, both adults and adolescents, when it is common in other graves to find injuries in men, women and children in equal proportions.
“Most of the evidence we have [in Europe] corresponds to massacres, indiscriminate killings of people,” explains the also researcher at the University of Oxford. Unlike the randomness of the massacres, in the Alava site “we are seeing organized violence that is carried out essentially by men.”
Furthermore, the wounds of many of the individuals are healed, and five of them combine healed injuries with unhealed ones, “which means that they were exposed to violence several times,” the expert points out. Given that it takes time to heal bone wounds, the remains show that the conflict “lasted at least months,” according to Fernández-Crespo.
The researchers support this hypothesis with two more findings. On the one hand, at the site there are many adolescents with signs of violence, which suggests that they were forced to participate in the battle to compensate for the lack of adults, probably the result of a long period of conflict and regional instability. On the other hand, bone analyzes have revealed signs of stress and nutritional deficiency in the remains, showing that the population was not well fed.
“Not all victims of war are those who suffer direct violent damage, but there is a lot of collateral damage. The bulk of the population also suffers, for example, from the burning of fields, the theft of livestock and the limitation on freedom of movement,” concludes the researcher.
A mystery that remains to be resolved at the San Juan deposit before Portam Latinam is the origin of the conflict. Researchers have not been able to clarify the causes, not even if it was an internal war between communities in the area (which seems most likely), or if it was the arrival of external groups that triggered the conflict. It is something, in fact, that they plan to continue studying in the future with isotopic and genetic analyses.
The Alava site, the second largest prehistoric burial area on the Iberian Peninsula, was discovered in 1985, when an excavator widening an agricultural road accidentally unearthed some human fragments. The remains of the 338 individuals were completed excavated in 1991 after recovery teams demolished the rock covering the mass grave. The roof fell on the site and fragmented the bones into thousands of pieces, so the first research team had the task of reconstructing the skeletal remains.
The analysis of that first team found among the deceased a total of 53 healed cranial injuries and one unhealed. The figures, which were considered good at the time, do not match what we know today: “It was striking in the literature that there were so few unhealed traumas for so many deposited individuals,” explains the anthropologist from the University of Valladolid. This discrepancy was what motivated the current reanalysis, in which the Spanish team has identified a total of 107 cranial injuries, of which 48 had not healed. In addition, they have found 47 postcranial traumas, 17 of them unhealed.
“It is not so much that the techniques have evolved, but rather that from 2005 until now the number of cases of prehistoric violence that we know of has multiplied,” details the expert. “We have learned to see very easily what characteristics are typical of unhealed trauma.” The richness of the new results is, ultimately, the result of experience.
