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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.

--> 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.