The Most Unsettling MYSTERY, No one can Explain... [14:25]

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
0:01 · This is Somerset, Southwest England. A rather unlikely place for such a bizarre tale. You see,
0:07 · beneath what looks like this peaceful countryside, the sweeping rolling hills
0:12 · here laid a secret so dark archaeologists could hardly believe their eyes when they unearthed it.
0:21 · Something happened here in this quiet corner of Bronze Age Britain. Something that wouldn't
0:25 · fit the usual narrative of peaceful farming communities. these early metal workers. In fact,
0:31 · 37 bodies were found right here. Men, women, and children dismembered, brutally attacked,
0:38 · and in some cases eaten. This wasn't a battle of any kind. Simply put, this was a massacre,
0:46 · one of the most gruesome of all prehistoric Britain. And it happened 4,000 years ago,
0:51 · long before kings and queens and recorded history during the so-called peaceful Bronze Age.
0:58 · Nothing about this added up to those archaeologists, and it was certainly
1:01 · like nothing they'd seen before. So, who were the victims of this attack, and why were they
1:06 · butchered in such a way? And of course, what kind of society could this happen in? What
1:10 · were the conditions at the time? Welcome to the story of the most unsettling Bronze Age mystery.
1:21 · In the 1970s, a group of archaeologists were surveying a remote patch of land
1:25 · in the Mendip Hills, a region better known for its Roman mining ruins, ancient bloodshed. Now,
1:32 · they came across a natural shaft, a 20 m deep uh natural feature in the limestone landscape.
1:40 · I'll try and show you exactly where that is very shortly when I find it from a safe distance
1:45 · because this landscape is littered with all kinds of dangers, disused shafts, holes in the ground,
1:51 · wonderful array of natural features here, but you do need to be rather careful. More on that
1:56 · very shortly. buried in this darkness. The archaeologists would be unaware at the time,
2:02 · but they were looking at 37 individual human beings, men, women, children,
2:08 · and these bones were just discarded. They weren't ceremonially placed or positioned in any way,
2:14 · chucked in and crushed amongst animal bones. At first, no one knew what to make of it. Was it a
2:20 · burial site, a collapsed dwelling, perhaps even an accident of some kind? There is plenty of
2:25 · sink holes and crevices here. But the more that was uncovered, the more confusing this got. Now,
2:31 · early on in these excavations, well, the bones started to tell their own story. You see,
2:37 · every single skull found had evidence of a blunt force trauma. There was cut marks over every
2:42 · single bone, the limbs, the ribs, the jaw marks. There was nothing peaceful about what happened
2:48 · here. Nothing ceremonial and certainly no evidence of disease or perhaps even natural disaster.
2:54 · So, just working my way through this valley. I need to go up the valley side on the south side
3:00 · back across to where the site is of this Bronze Age uh massacre. Now, I've just come across one
3:06 · of these dams. Now, apparently there's seven of these throughout this particular part of
3:10 · the landscape. And no one knows the date. Could be 18th century to do with the mines,
3:14 · but also could be Roman because the sediment behind it dates to nearly 2,000 years ago.
3:21 · And the deeper archaeologists looked, the stranger things got. The victims had been dismembered,
3:26 · deliberately broken down. Their bones bore signs of evisceration, marrow extraction, and possibly
3:32 · even cannibalism. This site I'm hoping to show you very soon at the top of the valley. This wasn't
3:37 · any kind of formal burial site. This was a dumping ground, a crime scene from 4,000 years ago.
3:47 · Sometime between 2,700 and 2,200 BC, we start to see this shift into the Bronze Age away from
3:55 · the Neolithic, the last era of the Stone Age. And that period of time is quite difficult to
4:00 · define in terms of when it happened largely over a significant period of time unlike 1500 years
4:07 · before when we went from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic probably in quite a quick period of
4:12 · time. The bellbeaker movement seeing people come across from the mainland Europe the continent in
4:18 · around 2500 BC and bringing with them their namesake of pottery amongst other things. And
4:24 · we start to see a change in burial practices away from the communal and onto the singular barrerows
4:30 · of various round shapes and sizes. And of course these newcomers which have been suggested to
4:35 · replace 90% of the Neolithic gene pool brought with them metal working. And during this bronze
4:41 · age period, this 2,400 to 800 BC broadly, well, we do have lots of skeletal remains,
4:48 · hundreds of skeletal remains in fact to do all kinds of analysis on, but very few
4:53 · of them exhibit any kind of physical violence. And on the rare occasion that we do have those,
4:59 · where they all seem to have one thing in common. Take for example, firstly the skeleton of a young
5:06 · adult male found in a ditch at Stonehenge shot many times with flint tip arrows. Another example,
5:13 · Rton, West Sussex, a young adult male skeleton exhibiting sharp force trauma,
5:19 · likely with a bronze dagger. Now, in both those examples, those single incidents, well, we can't
5:26 · even tell the means in which they were treated to end up in that way they did. Was it revenge,
5:30 · punishment, sacrifice? maybe even warfare. They're really sometimes very difficult to
5:35 · interpret. And of course, we have very little evidence at all for multiple graves in this
5:41 · era. But here, Charter House Warren, we have the opposite of everything we knew about this
5:47 · era. The opposite of the normalery rights for this period, notwithstanding the extreme trauma.
5:56 · Okay, let's talk shafts and bones. Was quite important. Now, back in the 1970s, that's exactly
6:03 · what they found here. A 20 m deep natural shaft in the landscape. When you find such a shaft or a
6:10 · cave system, while the caving community are always quite keen to map it, two separate excavations,
6:17 · which doesn't seem like the right word, took place here after this site was discovered, mid 1970s and
6:23 · a decade or so later. When we appreciate the depth of what they found physically and metaphorically,
6:29 · we can understand why at last we're climbing out of the valley towards our site. Now,
6:35 · because of what these excavations saw, the two of them, we're now able to do this wonderful diagram,
6:40 · sort a cross-section of this sinkhole, of this uh natural feature in the landscape. And it's split
6:48 · into different horizons. Each horizon giving you a different level, a different depth within that
6:53 · system. And of course, each horizon telling its own story. Now, the first of these horizons, well,
6:59 · that was horizon number one, documented at 6 to 15 m in depth and contained very little evidence
7:06 · of any bones or interesting bits whatsoever. Horizon 2, however, told a very different story.
7:13 · Horizon 2 was first reached in 1975. As part of this documentation and excavation,
7:19 · at a depth of 15 m, we start to see a lot of human remains, disarticulated limbs, fragmented human
7:26 · bones, cattle bones, even some evidence of some pottery, a beaker period. Horizon 3. Once again,
7:33 · very little in this 5 m section. However, when we reach horizon 4 at 20 m in depth,
7:40 · we see bones. Not many, but specifically very young children. This horizon, like number two,
7:47 · was less than a meter in depth, but contained the neonatal remains, animal bones, and various
7:54 · artifacts, flint daggers, antler spatulas, and sponge finger stones. Both Horizon 2 and
8:01 · 4 dated between 2,343 BC and 236 BC. say the big question, of course, what exactly happened here?
8:13 · [Music] Now, over 3,000 individual bones were found within that shaft,
8:22 · and I went to the dangers of that shaft, the cave system. Well, they recovered around about
8:27 · 50% of them. And most of those came from horizon number two. Now based on the number of long bones,
8:35 · limbs perhaps they tried to work out how many bodies there were and the estimation
8:40 · eventually came to 37. Okay, reached the valley top. Little bit of context to the landscape I
8:45 · haven't already described. Down there we have the valley I've been walking through. Very beautiful,
8:50 · gorgeous day as well. Just down there about a mile or so away is Cheddar Gorge. Very famous
8:56 · gorge that runs down here through the southern side of the Mendips. And I don't know if you
9:01 · can see or not, but right through the gap on the horizon there, well, that is the seven esty back
9:06 · onto this archeological excavation. These studies, well, the people excavating knew that something
9:11 · extremely dark had happened here. But the extent of the brutality of this attack was just quite
9:18 · staggering. Of the 3,000 bones found, over 600 had cut marks. 600. That's 20% of every human
9:28 · bone found had been in some way scored or cut. Then compare the animal bones found, 160 in total,
9:36 · and yet only 6% had cut marks. Now, if we take this one step further, because in for a penny,
9:41 · in for a pound, the location of the cut marks on the bones highlighted disarticulation and
9:47 · defleshing. And of course, we shouldn't forget the cranial element, the skull. They studied in
9:53 · detail 20 of the 37 and 45% of those showed very clear evidence of a blunt force trauma
10:01 · and they said it's highly likely that the others suffered the same fate too if not all of them.
10:12 · Okay, so we're very nearly on site. Not sure exactly where it is. There's a couple of
10:15 · potential locations I can see just up ahead of me. Now, before you comment on what you
10:19 · think happened here, because there's a number of different theories, before you comment,
10:23 · let me put to you another two pieces of evidence. Now, number one, importantly, two of these victims
10:31 · of the 37 actually contained the plague virus. Secondly, Horizon 2 data highlights that we are
10:38 · working with a period of 2197 BC to 2038 BC and absolutely can be confirmed to be a single event.
10:49 · So those on horizon 2, well those people, the vast majority of them, they grew up in this area. They
10:55 · belonged here and were of local origin. There were just two outliers who were from tens of kilometers
11:02 · away. So we have 37 bodies. We have men, children, women. We have immediate close quarter
11:09 · um brutality. We have dismemberment. We have defleed. We have cannibalism. We have all those
11:16 · pieces of evidence. We have no ceremonial burying whatsoever. We have violence after
11:22 · death as well. All of these things to consider and what the outcome could be of why this happened in
11:28 · such a manner. Now, before I discuss that, I'm having trouble finding where this location is.
11:33 · It said in the field just to the um south of that fence line just there. But there's no feature that
11:40 · describes exactly what we're after because after all these bodies were um placed in here. Over
11:46 · the next five centuries, the cattle bones were placed in as well. And they find lots of evidence
11:51 · of oroxs being placed there. And it said this left an 11 m depression in the ground. [Music]
12:01 · Now, many theories came and went over the years. Number one, conflict for resources. We don't think
12:07 · that's the case because we have no tin or copper deposits that would aid the Bronze Age folk of the
12:13 · time and that they could have used here. Food. Well, they did indeed enact cannibalism here on
12:19 · those people. However, their bodies, don't forget, were placed amongst cattle and a lot of bones,
12:25 · showing that this is unlikely to be the case. the illness of those carrying the plague. Well,
12:30 · perhaps that could have sparked fear in other communities, local communities. Well, it's
12:35 · difficult to interpret and understand then why they would go and do what they did and of course
12:39 · why then all the butchery thereafter. Now, that leaves us with just one option as to what happened
12:45 · here in my opinion. Now, I've just come back up to the top of the hill here away from the bracken
12:50 · down there and close to where I was looking in the field just earlier. And there indeed is our 11 m
12:56 · depression. quite a good vantage point from here. And I think that's is probably as close as we want
12:59 · to get. There's a bar fence, dry stone wall. Why would you want to go there? Let's leave that in
13:04 · peace as it should be. Now, there are many things we will probably never know about that site. Let's
13:12 · take some shelter from the sun. Who exactly were the perpetrators? Where did they come from? Were
13:18 · they local? Were they from far away? And the fact that site was 15 20 meters underground probably is
13:25 · a reason why we still have it to look at today and analyze. If it was perhaps closer to the service,
13:30 · then maybe it would have long gone by this point in time. We have a wellorganized and
13:36 · vicious attack here. And history tells us that we don't need to be a great distance from those that
13:42 · we have conflict with. Something as small as a theft or a land dispute can perhaps spark into
13:48 · something far more problematic. And this can of course escalate very quickly and all of a sudden
13:53 · something that started very small becomes very emotive in one community in one area. Now I'm no
14:02 · historian or academic or scholar. I make videos about things I enjoy largely around history and
14:07 · the landscape. And I think that's exactly what we have here. We have a dispute that
14:12 · for whatever reason escalated over time and then became very personal. See you this time next week.

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When I read about these savage things in the past I’m always wondering. Are we evolving? Are laws making us more civilized?

at 10:31 - plague is not a virus. It is a bacteria.

Whole thing sounds like end of battle, eating your enemies.

Plus/or sacrificing them to an evil entity, local gods.

I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen the Bronze Age introduced as the “so-called peaceful Bronze Age. But it’s been awhile since I’ve read the Iliad so maybe I need to refresh my memory ....

Here is a good quality printed study about this:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/antiquity/article/darker-angels-of-our-nature-early-bronze-age-butchered-human-remains-from-charterhouse-warren-somerset-uk/93EBB135C857C7B7992FC80A4ED927AF

Thanks! I forgot to include that. The PDF link:

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/93EBB135C857C7B7992FC80A4ED927AF/S0003598X24001807a.pdf/the-darker-angels-of-our-nature-early-bronze-age-butchered-human-remains-from-charterhouse-warren-somerset-uk.pdf

During the Coppertone age playful dogs were pulling down bathing suits everywhere.

If 100 percent of people were civilized 100 percent of the time, we wouldn’t need law. :^)

Every once in a while there is a witty post that makes me burst out laughing. This was the reply that did it today, thank you.

“ It is difficult to understand the human remains from Horizon 2 in anything other than a context of extreme violence and systematic corporeal insult seemingly including anthropophagy.”

Wow. That sure reads better in nerdish/academic speak than the far simpler, vulgar even, conventional turn of a phrase like “It’s hard to believe the remains could be from anything other than slaughter, dismemberment and cannibalism.”

Well, they ARE English, you know.

This isn’t news. Our ancestors all over the globe routinely killed and ate their enemies. Life’s hard. Two-legged game was much easier to find, kill, eat at times, I’m sure.

Thing that got ME was the thought whether that tongue had been cut out pre- or post-mortem. And how certain are they all of the “victims” were dead when they were disassembled for biltong, sweet breads and the like?

Simply put, this was a massacre

Did they happen to find chunks of white fur and shrapnel pieces from a Holy Hand Grenade?

More like the severed arm of the guy who was trying to use it. Took forever to count to three, that guy.

“What’s for dinner?” “Spaghetti and Pete’s ****s.”

Thanks! Some jokes work, some don't.

The Count of Monte Cristo [07/12/2025]

You are correct!

"Sing Goddess, of the wrath of Achilles, Peleus' son, the cursed wrath that brought countless sorrow on the Acheans and send to Hades many valiant warriors and made them food for dogs and birds of the air..."

Or something along those lines.

Look at us now.

I appreciate the Transcript! Love the landscape of the Mendip hills. A disturbing story, but in our times there was WWI and WWII and the various atrocities of Communism. Cannabalism has taken place in the SPac in WWII, and by the MauMau in Kenya, Maos Red Guard in China, and Liberia in the last 30 (?) years. Grim!

Oh well. I need to find to look at so I do not carry this bronze age history to bed with me. Maybe some day it will come out on Brit Box!

Thank you! It is a bacteria.

Thanks!

--> YouTube-Generated Transcript <--
0:01	·	This is Somerset, Southwest England. A rather unlikely place for such a bizarre tale. You see,
0:07	·	beneath what looks like this peaceful countryside, the sweeping rolling hills
0:12	·	here laid a secret so dark archaeologists could hardly believe their eyes when they unearthed it.
0:21	·	Something happened here in this quiet corner of Bronze Age Britain. Something that wouldn't
0:25	·	fit the usual narrative of peaceful farming communities. these early metal workers. In fact,
0:31	·	37 bodies were found right here. Men, women, and children dismembered, brutally attacked,
0:38	·	and in some cases eaten. This wasn't a battle of any kind. Simply put, this was a massacre,
0:46	·	one of the most gruesome of all prehistoric Britain. And it happened 4,000 years ago,
0:51	·	long before kings and queens and recorded history during the so-called peaceful Bronze Age.
0:58	·	Nothing about this added up to those archaeologists, and it was certainly
1:01	·	like nothing they'd seen before. So, who were the victims of this attack, and why were they
1:06	·	butchered in such a way? And of course, what kind of society could this happen in? What
1:10	·	were the conditions at the time? Welcome to the story of the most unsettling Bronze Age mystery.
1:21	·	In the 1970s, a group of archaeologists were surveying a remote patch of land
1:25	·	in the Mendip Hills, a region better known for its Roman mining ruins, ancient bloodshed. Now,
1:32	·	they came across a natural shaft, a 20 m deep uh natural feature in the limestone landscape.
1:40	·	I'll try and show you exactly where that is very shortly when I find it from a safe distance
1:45	·	because this landscape is littered with all kinds of dangers, disused shafts, holes in the ground,
1:51	·	wonderful array of natural features here, but you do need to be rather careful. More on that
1:56	·	very shortly. buried in this darkness. The archaeologists would be unaware at the time,
2:02	·	but they were looking at 37 individual human beings, men, women, children,
2:08	·	and these bones were just discarded. They weren't ceremonially placed or positioned in any way,
2:14	·	chucked in and crushed amongst animal bones. At first, no one knew what to make of it. Was it a
2:20	·	burial site, a collapsed dwelling, perhaps even an accident of some kind? There is plenty of
2:25	·	sink holes and crevices here. But the more that was uncovered, the more confusing this got. Now,
2:31	·	early on in these excavations, well, the bones started to tell their own story. You see,
2:37	·	every single skull found had evidence of a blunt force trauma. There was cut marks over every
2:42	·	single bone, the limbs, the ribs, the jaw marks. There was nothing peaceful about what happened
2:48	·	here. Nothing ceremonial and certainly no evidence of disease or perhaps even natural disaster.
2:54	·	So, just working my way through this valley. I need to go up the valley side on the south side
3:00	·	back across to where the site is of this Bronze Age uh massacre. Now, I've just come across one
3:06	·	of these dams. Now, apparently there's seven of these throughout this particular part of
3:10	·	the landscape. And no one knows the date. Could be 18th century to do with the mines,
3:14	·	but also could be Roman because the sediment behind it dates to nearly 2,000 years ago.
3:21	·	And the deeper archaeologists looked, the stranger things got. The victims had been dismembered,
3:26	·	deliberately broken down. Their bones bore signs of evisceration, marrow extraction, and possibly
3:32	·	even cannibalism. This site I'm hoping to show you very soon at the top of the valley. This wasn't
3:37	·	any kind of formal burial site. This was a dumping ground, a crime scene from 4,000 years ago.
3:47	·	Sometime between 2,700 and 2,200 BC, we start to see this shift into the Bronze Age away from
3:55	·	the Neolithic, the last era of the Stone Age. And that period of time is quite difficult to
4:00	·	define in terms of when it happened largely over a significant period of time unlike 1500 years
4:07	·	before when we went from the Mesolithic to the Neolithic probably in quite a quick period of
4:12	·	time. The bellbeaker movement seeing people come across from the mainland Europe the continent in
4:18	·	around 2500 BC and bringing with them their namesake of pottery amongst other things. And
4:24	·	we start to see a change in burial practices away from the communal and onto the singular barrerows
4:30	·	of various round shapes and sizes. And of course these newcomers which have been suggested to
4:35	·	replace 90% of the Neolithic gene pool brought with them metal working. And during this bronze
4:41	·	age period, this 2,400 to 800 BC broadly, well, we do have lots of skeletal remains,
4:48	·	hundreds of skeletal remains in fact to do all kinds of analysis on, but very few
4:53	·	of them exhibit any kind of physical violence. And on the rare occasion that we do have those,
4:59	·	where they all seem to have one thing in common. Take for example, firstly the skeleton of a young
5:06	·	adult male found in a ditch at Stonehenge shot many times with flint tip arrows. Another example,
5:13	·	Rton, West Sussex, a young adult male skeleton exhibiting sharp force trauma,
5:19	·	likely with a bronze dagger. Now, in both those examples, those single incidents, well, we can't
5:26	·	even tell the means in which they were treated to end up in that way they did. Was it revenge,
5:30	·	punishment, sacrifice? maybe even warfare. They're really sometimes very difficult to
5:35	·	interpret. And of course, we have very little evidence at all for multiple graves in this
5:41	·	era. But here, Charter House Warren, we have the opposite of everything we knew about this
5:47	·	era. The opposite of the normalery rights for this period, notwithstanding the extreme trauma.
5:56	·	Okay, let's talk shafts and bones. Was quite important. Now, back in the 1970s, that's exactly
6:03	·	what they found here. A 20 m deep natural shaft in the landscape. When you find such a shaft or a
6:10	·	cave system, while the caving community are always quite keen to map it, two separate excavations,
6:17	·	which doesn't seem like the right word, took place here after this site was discovered, mid 1970s and
6:23	·	a decade or so later. When we appreciate the depth of what they found physically and metaphorically,
6:29	·	we can understand why at last we're climbing out of the valley towards our site. Now,
6:35	·	because of what these excavations saw, the two of them, we're now able to do this wonderful diagram,
6:40	·	sort a cross-section of this sinkhole, of this uh natural feature in the landscape. And it's split
6:48	·	into different horizons. Each horizon giving you a different level, a different depth within that
6:53	·	system. And of course, each horizon telling its own story. Now, the first of these horizons, well,
6:59	·	that was horizon number one, documented at 6 to 15 m in depth and contained very little evidence
7:06	·	of any bones or interesting bits whatsoever. Horizon 2, however, told a very different story.
7:13	·	Horizon 2 was first reached in 1975. As part of this documentation and excavation,
7:19	·	at a depth of 15 m, we start to see a lot of human remains, disarticulated limbs, fragmented human
7:26	·	bones, cattle bones, even some evidence of some pottery, a beaker period. Horizon 3. Once again,
7:33	·	very little in this 5 m section. However, when we reach horizon 4 at 20 m in depth,
7:40	·	we see bones. Not many, but specifically very young children. This horizon, like number two,
7:47	·	was less than a meter in depth, but contained the neonatal remains, animal bones, and various
7:54	·	artifacts, flint daggers, antler spatulas, and sponge finger stones. Both Horizon 2 and
8:01	·	4 dated between 2,343 BC and 236 BC. say the big question, of course, what exactly happened here?
8:13	·	[Music] Now, over 3,000 individual bones were found within that shaft,
8:22	·	and I went to the dangers of that shaft, the cave system. Well, they recovered around about
8:27	·	50% of them. And most of those came from horizon number two. Now based on the number of long bones,
8:35	·	limbs perhaps they tried to work out how many bodies there were and the estimation
8:40	·	eventually came to 37. Okay, reached the valley top. Little bit of context to the landscape I
8:45	·	haven't already described. Down there we have the valley I've been walking through. Very beautiful,
8:50	·	gorgeous day as well. Just down there about a mile or so away is Cheddar Gorge. Very famous
8:56	·	gorge that runs down here through the southern side of the Mendips. And I don't know if you
9:01	·	can see or not, but right through the gap on the horizon there, well, that is the seven esty back
9:06	·	onto this archeological excavation. These studies, well, the people excavating knew that something
9:11	·	extremely dark had happened here. But the extent of the brutality of this attack was just quite
9:18	·	staggering. Of the 3,000 bones found, over 600 had cut marks. 600. That's 20% of every human
9:28	·	bone found had been in some way scored or cut. Then compare the animal bones found, 160 in total,
9:36	·	and yet only 6% had cut marks. Now, if we take this one step further, because in for a penny,
9:41	·	in for a pound, the location of the cut marks on the bones highlighted disarticulation and
9:47	·	defleshing. And of course, we shouldn't forget the cranial element, the skull. They studied in
9:53	·	detail 20 of the 37 and 45% of those showed very clear evidence of a blunt force trauma
10:01	·	and they said it's highly likely that the others suffered the same fate too if not all of them.
10:12	·	Okay, so we're very nearly on site. Not sure exactly where it is. There's a couple of
10:15	·	potential locations I can see just up ahead of me. Now, before you comment on what you
10:19	·	think happened here, because there's a number of different theories, before you comment,
10:23	·	let me put to you another two pieces of evidence. Now, number one, importantly, two of these victims
10:31	·	of the 37 actually contained the plague virus. Secondly, Horizon 2 data highlights that we are
10:38	·	working with a period of 2197 BC to 2038 BC and absolutely can be confirmed to be a single event.
10:49	·	So those on horizon 2, well those people, the vast majority of them, they grew up in this area. They
10:55	·	belonged here and were of local origin. There were just two outliers who were from tens of kilometers
11:02	·	away. So we have 37 bodies. We have men, children, women. We have immediate close quarter
11:09	·	um brutality. We have dismemberment. We have defleed. We have cannibalism. We have all those
11:16	·	pieces of evidence. We have no ceremonial burying whatsoever. We have violence after
11:22	·	death as well. All of these things to consider and what the outcome could be of why this happened in
11:28	·	such a manner. Now, before I discuss that, I'm having trouble finding where this location is.
11:33	·	It said in the field just to the um south of that fence line just there. But there's no feature that
11:40	·	describes exactly what we're after because after all these bodies were um placed in here. Over
11:46	·	the next five centuries, the cattle bones were placed in as well. And they find lots of evidence
11:51	·	of oroxs being placed there. And it said this left an 11 m depression in the ground. [Music]
12:01	·	Now, many theories came and went over the years. Number one, conflict for resources. We don't think
12:07	·	that's the case because we have no tin or copper deposits that would aid the Bronze Age folk of the
12:13	·	time and that they could have used here. Food. Well, they did indeed enact cannibalism here on
12:19	·	those people. However, their bodies, don't forget, were placed amongst cattle and a lot of bones,
12:25	·	showing that this is unlikely to be the case. the illness of those carrying the plague. Well,
12:30	·	perhaps that could have sparked fear in other communities, local communities. Well, it's
12:35	·	difficult to interpret and understand then why they would go and do what they did and of course
12:39	·	why then all the butchery thereafter. Now, that leaves us with just one option as to what happened
12:45	·	here in my opinion. Now, I've just come back up to the top of the hill here away from the bracken
12:50	·	down there and close to where I was looking in the field just earlier. And there indeed is our 11 m
12:56	·	depression. quite a good vantage point from here. And I think that's is probably as close as we want
12:59	·	to get. There's a bar fence, dry stone wall. Why would you want to go there? Let's leave that in
13:04	·	peace as it should be. Now, there are many things we will probably never know about that site. Let's
13:12	·	take some shelter from the sun. Who exactly were the perpetrators? Where did they come from? Were
13:18	·	they local? Were they from far away? And the fact that site was 15 20 meters underground probably is
13:25	·	a reason why we still have it to look at today and analyze. If it was perhaps closer to the service,
13:30	·	then maybe it would have long gone by this point in time. We have a wellorganized and
13:36	·	vicious attack here. And history tells us that we don't need to be a great distance from those that
13:42	·	we have conflict with. Something as small as a theft or a land dispute can perhaps spark into
13:48	·	something far more problematic. And this can of course escalate very quickly and all of a sudden
13:53	·	something that started very small becomes very emotive in one community in one area. Now I'm no
14:02	·	historian or academic or scholar. I make videos about things I enjoy largely around history and
14:07	·	the landscape. And I think that's exactly what we have here. We have a dispute that
14:12	·	for whatever reason escalated over time and then became very personal. See you this time next week.