Posted on 10/19/2013 6:21:36 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
New research has turned up some perplexing clues in a prehistoric mystery: the fate of three men found in a mass grave in California, their bodies riddled with arrow points and dumped in a pit some 560 years ago.
Their violent deaths came at a tumultuous time in Central California, archaeologists say, as bands were vying brutally for territory and resources.
Indeed, the archaeological record from the period is rife with evidence of hand-to-hand combat: fractured skulls, broken arms, even body parts taken as trophies.
But the new clues, uncovered by anthropologists at the University of California Davis, don’t have anything to do with who killed the men, or why. Instead, they’re shedding light on where the men were from.
And the results -- revealed in the chemistry of the victims’ teeth and bones -- show that they were something like prodigal sons: born and raised in the same region where they were buried, but having spent most of their adult lives far away.
Unlike the Lost Son of the Biblical parable, however, these men were not feted when they returned. Instead, they were killed...
The victims were first discovered by a farmer in 1964, buried in a mound on a floodplain of the Sacramento River in Yolo County, about 100 kilometers northeast of San Francisco.
Anthropologists called in from Davis found four bodies in the pit and excavated three of them. The men had been interred in mass-grave fashion, without being placed in a traditional, flexed position and without any grave goods.
And all of them had suffered obvious physical trauma: Each had at least three, and in one case as many as seven, loose arrow points still in his rib cage; and in two of the men, obsidian points were still embedded in their spines.
(Excerpt) Read more at westerndigs.org ...
Pre-Columbian would be the correct term in this case.
IMO
Absolutely fascinating. I didn’t realize that we could be traced to wherever we spent any time, and not just by the Keystone NSA. Love this.
Not all recording is in writing ...
Sounds like they were exiled early in their lives (young hooligans, blasphemers maybe?) and executed by 'firing squad' when they returned.
Or, they were captured early in their lives, weren’t recognized when they managed to return, and were killed because they had been given tribal marks by the captors.
The remains are *also* PreColumbian, and unless and until someone finds writing associated with the site they are accurately described as prehistoric.
Sounds like death by archery squad.
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