In 1969 sociologist Johan Galtung published a paper called ‘Violence, Peace, and Peace Research’. In it he laid out what he understood of violence, and the definition he gives is very different to the one we have been considering in the previous chapter in terms of blows landed and enemies dispatched. He extends the idea of violence to the circumscription of what people can do, achieve, or be.1 In his example, violence is implicit when bad things happen and they did not have to; death from tuberculosis before the advent of modern medical treatment would not be violence, but death in the modern world, where treatment exists, is. Someone, somewhere, is being prevented from being cured, and that is an act of violence. It’s a sobering thought, but begs the question of who implements this kind of violence, and how. In Galtung’s formulation, there is a line drawn between a personal act of violence and one in which there is no clear actor; the latter is what we mean when we talk about structural violence. This chapter discusses the violence in between the personal and the professional; direct physical constraints on physical lives. This is the violence of society enacted on its members, of human processes on human beings. Much of what Galtung considers structural violence can be found in other parts of this book, particularly the sections on inequality, but here we will restrict ourselves to physical processes enacted on entire groups of people that we can identify in the bioarchaeological record – systematic physical violence directed towards specific groups in society: women, children, social inferiors, criminals, prisoners of war and outsiders in general.
If we are to talk about violence incurred by vulnerable groups in society, one of the most depressing places to start is with a group that is, by definition, dependent on carers for survival: children. Child abuse, as defined by UNICEF today, is a very tricky concept to apply retrospectively, including as it does: ‘all forms of physical or mental violence, injury and abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, maltreatment or exploitation, including sexual abuse.’ As with domestic abuse, specifically violence against women, societal attitudes about what constitutes ‘abuse’ have changed markedly.2 In several countries it’s illegal to physically discipline a child, while in rather more it’s an expected, accepted part of childhood.3 Archaeology can be frustratingly obtuse on the subject of the patterns of discipline considered socially acceptable in the past, but bioarchaeology, on the other hand, can give us clear evidence of children who were sufficiently mistreated that they bear the scars on their very bones. Scarred children are not a long-term survival strategy in any evolutionary context, but given what we know about modern-day rates of child abuse,4 it’s surprising that we don’t see much evidence of child abuse in the skeletons of the children of the past.
Of course, there are many reasons for this, and not all of them evoke a better world. In the previous chapter on violence, we have discussed the bony response to trauma in the case of fracture. We also covered the special case of greenstick fracture in childhood, and how the less-mineralised bone of the still-growing child responds to force slightly differently than adult bone. The plasticity of juvenile bone, and its capacity for remodelling, may be one of the main factors in masking our awareness of children’s broken bones in the past; healed breaks that have been survived for some time might be virtually invisible to bioarchaeological investigation. The clinical definition of Battered Child Syndrome requires evidence of chronic mistreatment: a pattern of healed, healing and new injuries. In modern instances this can be identified in soft tissue damage as well as in the skeleton, but for cases in the past we have only the bones to guide us. The bones of adults may not transmit a true signal of the trauma experienced in childhood – bones and bruises, at least, might heal.
In the remains of children, however, a combination of evidence of bruising and fracture can be used to build a diagnosis. Violent trauma, direct blows or the grabbing and manhandling of limbs can injure the sausage-casing-like periosteum around bone; this leads to ‘bone bruising’, in the words of our constant companion in the world of bioarchaeological violence, Phil Walker. The damage to periosteum stimulates bone activity to the extent that an actively healing area of injury can be identified by the characteristic new bone formation sequence on the hard outer surface of the bone: scattered tiny dots that indicate microscopic pitting and thin straggly lines of new bone forming on top of old. This same sequence occurs with ‘anything that tears, breaks, stretches or even touches’ the sensitive periosteum; the whole inflammation routine, however, can be triggered by any number of conditions, including infectious disease and parasites. When observed in combination with fractures, however (and particularly the typical fractures of the ribs or ends of growing long bones that result from shaking), it may be possible to identify cases of child abuse in the past.
The large cemetery at the site of Kellis 2 in Dakhleh Oasis in the middle of Egypt’s Western Desert gives us an example of what evidence of child abuse might look like archaeologically. Dating to the Roman period, sometime in the first 500 years AD, a two- to three-year-old child died with considerable trauma. There were broken ribs, ‘bone bruises’ to the arms, broken arms, a broken clavicle and even fractures to the vertebrae and pelvis. These injuries were at different stages of healing when the child died, indicating a pattern of trauma indicative of child abuse. Mary Lewis of the University of Reading has compiled the known instances of violence against children in the archaeological record – a mammoth task, but surmountable because the numbers involved are actually very small. Part of this, as Lewis argues, is the above issue that the bones of children do not respond to trauma in quite the same way that adult bones do, so we are looking at a very different reflection of violence in the past. That said, only a very few of her already limited number of cases can be interpreted as evidence of child abuse. In Europe, a total of three children have typical fractures of the limbs and metaphyseal growth plates mentioned above, one from Roman France and the others from England in the Roman and medieval period. Is this proof that the past was kinder, and children more loved? Or just a reminder that children’s skeletons are plastic, growing things and that the skeletal process of remodelling can remove traces of violence from archaeologists’ eyes?
These are isolated cases, which Phil Walker has argued is evidence that child abuse was in fact very rare in the past, despite the reputation of ‘old-fashioned’ methods of child rearing; even then it’s the physical discipline of school-age and above children that most commonly comes to mind.5 He argues that it’s only our modern urban settings, divorced from normal social networks of a more integrated family life, which encourage the pathologies of child abuse. The skeletal evidence of violence that we see in modern forensic cases of child abuse should be visible in the past, if rates were as high as they are today. In Walker’s conceptualisation, urbanisation means anonymity, and isolation can be maintained without family or other parties becoming aware of the abuse and stepping in. I would agree with him that there are many factors that might be masking abuse in the past, predominantly to do with the poor survival of child remains, the potential for evidence of childhood abuse survived to be remodelled and absent at time of death, and even, I would add, where the victims of child abuse might be buried and whether or not archaeologists would find them there. I’m not so convinced, however, that the isolation he suggests was a real possibility for most urban dwellers. If isolation was a factor, then the high mobility and nucleation of family units of the post-war period of the twentieth century might seem to be a more immediate cause. But we know that child abuse did exist before extended families died out. There are certainly records from the medical establishment, unheeded at the time, of a plague of child abuse from at least a century before the identification of Battered Child Syndrome in the 1960s. While it seems that the horror stories related by our own parents (and theirs) of the cruelty our (your) generation has so narrowly escaped may have been slightly over-egged,6 there is potentially an argument to be made from the paucity of evidence of child abuse in the past, and its reappearance in modern times in situations of social disintegration, that violence against children is an extreme experience, and not the norm in town or out.
The second type of structural violence against vulnerable individuals is sadly very much a normalised pattern of abuse that seemingly stretches back as far as history takes us. The physical abuse of women seems to have occurred throughout the past and in cultures from all over the globe. As touched on in Chapter 6, there are specific fractures and wounds that are associated with self-defence. When associated with evidence of the head trauma that the defence was guarding against, a common bioarchaeological interpretation is that the victim was defending against attack. One could argue that the fractures and other evidence of trauma on the skeletons of women might be just as easily attributable to accidents, or even a more straightforward episode of mano a mano violence, but one would be talking absolute bollocks.7 There is an extraordinary amount of literature that covers the ethnographic, historic, anthropological, psychological and sociological evidence of violence against women, and while I haven’t got a snowball’s chance in hell of covering most of it here, I can helpfully summarise. Violence against women is endemic. It occurs in all types of societies, at all levels of complexity and at all times. While bioarchaeology may not be able to distinguish exactly those episodes of violence that are the result of structural features of society and those which are not, modern statistics can give us some guidance: according to the World Health Organization, one in three women will be victims of domestic physical or sexual violence in their lifetimes.
In the case of domestic abuse, Phil Walker’s argument for the causes of child abuse – that modern urban society is responsible for the rise in cases – falls flat. We can take, for example, the !Kung San people, first encountered in Chapter 2. The first ethnographers of the San were amazed by their relatively low workload and seemingly peaceful attitudes. The observations by anthropologist Richard Borshay Lee in the 1960s featured the shocking revelation that hunting and gathering appeared to be much easier than it looked once you knew what you were doing. Further research decided that men worked more than women,8 society was very egalitarian and violence was largely absent. It might be helpful, for reference, to know that these observations were made in the context of what we might call the ‘yoghurt-crocheting’ zenith of cultural anthropology – that they were made largely by men, and that they were made by members of a society that still had9 systematic legal discrimination against women. Otherwise it’s very difficult to square these practical observations of broad universal themes of egalitarian equality with the personal narratives of women of the !Kung San. In the early 1980s, anthropologist Marjorie Shostak published a book focusing on the accounts of Nisa, an actual woman of the !Kung San. Nisa confirmed that life among the ‘egalitarian’ hunter-gatherer tradition included considerable amounts of domestic violence against women, including memories of her father kicking a pregnant wife, and her own daughter’s death due to a violent husband. These personal tragedies occur outside of a world of urbanism and cities, but they do fit with one of the suggestions that Phil Walker made about child abuse: that it happens in times of intense social stress. The integration of the last hunting and gathering tribes of the Kalahari into an agrarian state culture has not been a bloodless transition, and it might be that Nisa’s story is part of a larger violence affecting the entire social structure of the !Kung.
When we look at archaeological evidence for periods when domestic abuse (or at least violence against women) seems to increase, there are some tempting patterns. In the Late Woodland period, which sees the slow build-up of maize-growing and sedentary life in parts of the state of Michigan, the site of Rivière aux Vase contained considerable evidence of cranial trauma. Even greater numbers of heads were smacked than in regional contemporaries, and again, the blows fell on more female heads than male: 13 per cent of the women’s skulls examined showed evidence of healed depressed fractures. In Neolithic China, nearly 40 per cent of females in one period at Jinggouzi had broken noses; it is not known how representative a sample this group was, but it’s still an astonishingly high rate. In the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, a full 60 per cent of the women of the relatively comfortable Neolithic communities of the La Plata region have evidence of cranial trauma, versus 23 per cent of the men. In many of these situations there is some suggestion that environmental change (e.g. drought in the case of the Ancestral Puebloan culture of the American Southwest) was responsible for causing society-wide stress, but not all. Despite an overall trend for male skeletons to bear more evidence of violence, accidental or intentional, there are significantly more cranial fractures among the women of an agro-pastoralist Bronze Age population who lived under state control along China’s northern Mongolian frontier at Jinggouzi than among the more free-ranging pastoralist groups beyond.
Who else can a society turn its ire on, once we’re done with the women and children? Ever more specific groups that somehow contravene or subvert social order, people who mess with the natural order of the universe and cause pain and suffering for the rest of society. And it turns out that two of the groups most often accused of interfering with the natural order of things happen to be the marginalised majority: women and children. There is no scope in this book to go item by item through the list of oppressed minorities. We can, however, try to bring out the bioarchaeological evidence for what has happened in the past, but with the understanding that it’s very difficult to pin down a diagnosis of structural violence without the evidence of population-level trends. So while we can examine rates of violence against women and potentially recognise signs of child abuse in the past based on bones alone, we will need further evidence that other groups were intentionally targeted for maltreatment or even death by the societies in which they lived.
This is not to suggest that groups defined by different mental or physical health statuses and abilities, gender performance and sexual preference, or any other trait, were not targets of structural violence in the past.10 It is merely to say that we need to have a way of identifying signs of violence against them from an archaeological perspective. One of the primary sources of evidence for differences in treatment in life is difference in treatment at death; this is encapsulated in the term ‘deviant burial’. Where there are cultural norms for burial – neatly laid out versus messily heaped, not-squashed-under-a-rock versus squashed-under-a-rock – we can identify deviation from those norms. The dead mean most to the living, and the treatment and curation of their remains gives us an idea of how the society that did the burying felt about the individual that did the dying.
We can further separate deviant burials into types by how they deviate from the norm. In the archaeological evidence, the clearest indication of separation from the community in life is separation in death. Bodies buried in isolation (or simply not buried at all) or remains found mixed into trash heaps and lining ditches may signal that their owners were not necessarily valued members of the community. This treatment isn’t necessarily reserved for social deviants. About a decade ago, I ended up staying in the tiny village of Mitata in the Ionian Islands by the grace11 of the Kythera Island Project survey, the slightly bigger precursor on a slightly bigger island of the Antikythera Survey Project mentioned in Chapter 3. Despite being engaged in a very different project,12 I eventually got called down to the ferry harbour at Diakofti to come check out some bones found by the field school run by the indefatigable, much-loved local archaeological authority Aris Tsaravopoulos. I should say that Diakofti is a special place by any account: a minute village of four streets set firmly into a steep, featureless hillside, it only got running water in the 1980s. The place exists more or less solely because at some point the main port was relocated to the crystal-clear waters of its relatively large harbour – not clear enough, however, to prevent a drunk Russian sea captain from very scenically beaching a tanker just on the other side of the causeway connecting the harbour to the island proper. The marooned vessel formed a fitting backdrop as we bounced the rental car over the causeway and onto the undeveloped land facing out to sea.13 There, the mildly grubby faces of the field school students looked up expectantly from their latest find – an isolated grave, alone on the shoreline, facing out to sea.
I’d come to look at the body that had been exposed, and to settle whatever arguments remained among the archaeologists. Good money – i.e. unfounded gossip – suggested that the interment had been of an outcast girl, a teenager, who had died of syphilis sometime in the 1800s. This was a problematic interpretation as the skeleton was robustly male, with big limbs and pronounced chin and brow line. There were no signs of syphilis (discussed further in Chapter 11), but there was a potentially broken leg and quite a bit of reactive bone growth around the holes of the ears. I disabused the archaeologists of their favourite working theory and went on my way. Some weeks later, as yet more gossip spread around the town, I learned the sad truth. The locals did indeed know about the burial on the shore, and had for a very long time. The man in the grave by the sea had been a sponge diver from Corfu – hence the bony changes around his ears, caused by inflammation relating to the constant change of pressure14 – and when he died, no one in the village had had the money or will to send him home. So his burial occupied a funny halfway house between uncaring disposal and proper burial in the village churchyard.
In a similar vein, many readers might be familiar with the superstition about burying suicides at crossroads: it was in fact British law until 1823. Strict rules guarded the sanctity of the burial ground, and even after the crossroads thing was given up, suicides were supposed to join the paupers and the unbaptised. Of course, we know that these rules were regularly flouted. At St Bride’s Church, the fabulous Fleet Street institution where the pews are all sponsored by tabloids (it is traditionally the journalists’ church), a small collection of remains were recovered in neat coffins, complete with metal plates giving the occupants’ names and occasionally ages, after the destruction of the Blitz in the Second World War. These remains were carefully stored in a locked crypt for around 200 years before the bombs reopened their tomb, and after initial excavation have remained housed under the care of the church in which they were originally buried. Among these remains is the sad case of a young man, a young husband with a respectable career, who committed suicide by gunshot in 1821, before the crossroads law was even abolished. Newspapers reported the circumstances of his death, so it was hardly a secret; however, despite his mortal sin, he was still interred alongside the rest of his parish, with the record of his burial noting only that he was ‘suddenly found dead’.
Through a combination of bones and burials, we have access to clues about structural violence against people perceived to contravene social, cultural or spiritual norms from the way their bodies are treated in death. First there are the bodies of the morally, spiritually or otherwise dangerous: these are bodies that must be buried with special precautions. Then there are the bodies that simply are not worth the effort: remains of people whom the ones doing the burying don’t really consider people. There are also the bodies of those who require punishment even in death: the Anglo-Saxon tradition of burying executed criminals in embarrassing positions15 is one of the best-known examples of this. Finally, we have what may be the most flagrant abuse of bodies by society: taking either life, liberty, the body or its constituent parts and using them for your own ends. Into these categories, we can fit among the dangerous: suicides, witches and criminals; among the uncared for: enemies, the poor and outsiders; and among the ones whose very bodies are used against them: a motley crew comprising slaves, prisoners of war and human sacrifices.
First, let’s talk about witches. Witchcraft is remarkably common, and not just at your local folk music festival. Witches are one of the primary causes of bad luck in many parts of the world: sorcery, black magic and other acts of spiritual malfeasance can explain everything from crop failure to disease. It doesn’t particularly matter whether witches are real or not; in societies where a belief in the possibility of black magic or harmful spiritual activity exists, there are individuals who are accused of directing it. The UN Commission on Human Rights estimates that more than a thousand people are killed for witchcraft every year in Tanzania alone; while 'witches' are regularly killed in Asia, Oceania and Africa. In my own London neighbourhood, I receive three or four business cards a year, slipped through the mail slot in the front door, advertising the services of spiritual healers who can detect black magic done against me, not to mention advise me about marrying well, money and other spiritual matters.16 These cards are part of a wider narrative that includes the resurgent practice of exorcisms and church-sanctioned violence, and culminates in the modern practice of ‘necklacing’ suspected witches – dousing old tires in gasoline, sticking the witch in the middle and lighting a match.17
By and large, in culture after culture, witches were elderly women. It is they who bear the brunt of witchcraft accusations in the modern and ancient worlds, whether as an escalation of disagreements between community members or because they are a handy scapegoat. The question remains, however: how do you find witches once they’ve already gone to ground? Only a handful of archaeological cases exist that have been identified as ‘witch’ burials: a teenager under a rock in Lancashire; several ‘prone’ burials (where the deceased is placed facedown) from across Europe; and possibly a woman who died of lead poisoning on a slave plantation in Barbados and who was buried in a special ‘mound’ grave above the normal level of the earth.
There is good reason to suspect that in many cases, even people killed for witchcraft still received a fairly normal burial: several of the people hanged in Salem, Massachusetts during the sixteenth-century witch trials were later exhumed and buried elsewhere by their families. When archaeologists went looking for bodies under the infamous Gallows Hill in Salem, they found no evidence of any of the witches that had been supposedly buried there. In the absence of bodies under a gallows, the only way that their deaths could be identified as abnormal would be through the evidence of their bones. Judicial killing by ‘long drop’ hanging can cause a ‘Hangman’s fracture’ a characteristic fracture to the second vertebrae from the skull – the hyperextension of the neck by the suspension of the weight of the entire body. However, forensic research on the exhumed bodies of criminals executed by hanging in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries found the fracture in only 3 out of 34 cases, so even then we would have a hard time identifying them.
The rules that apply to witches apply to criminals too – deviant behaviour is rewarded with deviant death and burial. Aside from the hangman’s fracture discussed above, there are a number of methods of judicial killing that we can identify in the past. Judicial killing, or the justified imposition of death on an individual according to established and agreed rules of society, may occur anywhere, and at any level of complexity – at some level, even witches were ‘rightfully’ killed in the eyes of society, whether or not condoned by an arbitrary representative of a state or hierarchical power. Judicial killing can take many forms, most of which seem to have been perfected at one point or another by the Inquisition, though the Romans should take their fair share of the credit. The Roman punishment for parricide – killing your parents – seems to have been designed both with the goal of protecting parents from mercenary heirs as well as with a degree of whimsy. The convicted parricide sentenced to poena cullei18 - they were condemned to die in a sack, specifically an extra-large sack the size of one oxhide sewn together. The sack would be filled with the condemned, a dog, a rooster, a snake and a monkey, and chucked into a body of water. What symbolism was intended is lost in the mists of time, but it certainly captures the attention. No such commingled remains have ever been encountered in the beds of Roman rivers or lakes, so archaeology awaits further information on how much practical use this type of execution actually got.
Crucifixion, interestingly, is another type of judicial killing that you would think we would know more about. It was certainly popular enough. One of the problems with identifying crucifixion in the archaeological record perhaps comes down to the usual problem of not finding the bodies that are buried away from the rest of society, but may also be explained by the fact that we are not terribly sure how crucifixion was actually done. Any good Christian19 will have somewhere a mental image of one type of crucifixion, but we know from the writings of Seneca that there were multitudes of ways to die on the cross. The cross, for one thing, didn’t have to be of the sort represented by the Christian crucifix; it could be more of an ‘x’ shape; the victim could be attached to it by nails or rope, which could be around or through hands, arms, one foot or both, or even the groin:
I see before me crosses not all alike, but differently made by different peoples: some hang a man head downwards, some force a stick upwards through his groin, some stretch out his arms on a forked gibbet.
Seneca, ‘On Consolation to Marcia’, Chapter XX
The only bioarchaeological evidence of the practice in existence is a solitary heel bone, uncovered in Israel and controversially identified as a belonging to a victim of crucifixion because of the long nail perforating the middle of the bone. Potential supporting evidence comes from the fragmentary tibias in the same skeleton, which could have been broken according to the common practice of smashing the legs of the condemned, designed to either increase suffering or hasten death.20 Bioarchaeologist Kristina Killgrove has pointed out in her regular column for Forbes magazine that there could be a variety of reasons why we don’t have more evidence for crucifixion in the archaeological record, ranging from the reuse of crucifixion nails as spiritual objects to the likely discard of criminals’ bodies in less salubrious locations. It may be that the thousands of victims of crucifixion are simply lying undiscovered somewhere, far away from the cemeteries and graveyards of law-abiding Romans.
As for judicial killing practices that are more easily identified from the archaeological record, both beheading and ‘drawing and quartering’ are practices well known from TV and movies.21 Butchery marks at the appropriate locations are the key bioarchaeological evidence in these cases. Just as your steak knife leaves little indentations on the roundel of bone at the centre of your beef, hacking off a head leaves incontrovertible cuts, gouges and chop marks. Mary Lewis has identified the only known evidence of a skeleton of a man who appears to have been hanged, drawn and quartered, though in this case the powers that be seemed to have decided to throw in emasculation and beheading free of charge. In the time-honoured fashion of medieval tragedy, the story starts with royalty. In the 1300s, Edward II of England took the son of an extremely wealthy and powerful family, the Despensers, as a lover. Hugh Despenser turned the king’s head but more definitely put Queen Isabella’s nose out of joint. After a period of deteriorating personal and political relationships, Isabella went to France, found herself a lover and an army, and came storming back across the channel in 1326. She caught up with Despenser in Hereford, and executed him according to the new fashion that Edward II’s predecessor, Edward I, had come up with specifically to deal with Welsh separatists. Adding to the traditional practice of being drawn (tied to a horse, dragged through town) and then hanged, with the bodily remains quartered or split into four parts and dispersed, the condemned would be disembowelled and beheaded after the hanging. The account compiled by Lewis of Despenser’s last hours on earth suggests that the death was not an easy one. First, Despenser was humiliated, the sigils of his house symbolically reversed, and he was given a crown of nettles to wear. He was then dragged by four horses through the streets of Hereford, stood up on a ladder some 15 metres (50 feet) in the air and ‘hanged’ on a special gallows in front of the walls of his own castle. Choked but still conscious, he had his genitals cut off and burned in front of him, before he received a knife to the chest and was disembowelled. His entrails were burned, his head cut off, the rest of him chopped into the appropriate number of pieces, and Isabella’s justice was done. It’s a remarkable piece of bioarchaeological detective work, consolidated by the clear evidence of the bones: the upper vertebrae are sliced through the middle, there are chop marks on the clavicle and arms, and even a stab wound that has gone through to the inside of the chest and left its mark on one of the vertebrae.
The execution of Hugh Despenser was specific enough that the trauma it inflicted on his body could be traced back through his bones. Beheading, on the other hand, is trickier. Coming back to the concept of deviant burial, we require a combination of bioarchaeological assessment of whether the individual was alive or dead by the time their head came off, as well as knowledge of the cultural context of their death, to understand whether an isolated head is evidence of structural violence.22 Many cultures, starting well back into the Neolithic, maintained skulls as some sort of ritual practice, as evidenced by the 8,000- to 9,000-year-old plaster-coated skull with shell-inlay eyes found at Jericho and now in the British Museum. Decapitation might be part of burial rituals, or it might be a judicial killing; without context it can be difficult to distinguish between symbolism and sentence. Beheadings certainly have been used as means of judicial killing,23 but they have also been used as means of protecting against spiritual harm from ‘dangerous’ burials; cutting the head off suspected vampires falls into this category. Unfortunately, the bioarchaeological evidence of vampire burials – decapitation, piercing wounds, unusual body layouts – rather exactly matches what might be expected from the burials of witches, executed criminals and even suicides.
The case of Hugh Despenser is illustrative of the emotive power of the human body, both in the manner of death and in the disposition of it afterwards. In the not-so-distant past, those on the losing side of conflicts not only suffered the inconvenience of dying, but the further indignity of their physical bodies being captured by the enemy. While we in the modern age may attribute our spiritual being to a nebulous ephemeral realm and have no compunction about burning our corporeal remains to ash, this is not a universal concept. For a great deal of known religious thought, past and present, the body is crucial to spiritual life. It is not hard to imagine that people in the past would have been horrified (as all but the most sanguine of Gnostics would) by the thought of their heads on spikes as trophies of war.24
If we want to think about the abuse of bodies, in life as well as death, there can be no better example than empires. Complex urban political systems, displaying their power to an audience both at home and abroad, seem to provoke a specific type of violence that emerges alongside those very first cities. It precedes and then pervades the empires of the world: in both of the Americas, in Europe, in the Ancient Near East, in Asia, in Africa. It can be a form of structural violence, the violence of society against its members, or it can be a form of aggression turned outwards, but it leaves bodies in its wake just the same. If any kind of death can be attributed to the dawn of cities above all others, it’s the very particular case of people killed as chattel – as gifts, as pets, or as subjects. The rise of cities is intricately tied to an entirely new sort of power – the power over individual lives. This is the most revolutionary aspect of urban living: a concentration of power that extends to the control of the physical bodies of the population. There are two principle expressions of a state’s control of the physical beings of its subjects: control of labour, and control of life. The former might take the form of corveé labour, obligatory communal agricultural work or even forced factory or specialist labour. The latter is more accessible through the skeletal remains of the physical bodies so manipulated: not only judicial killing, but evidence of mutilation, and evidence of human sacrifice.
We know quite a bit about human sacrifice in the age of empires, particularly from the Americas. The Olmec, the Aztec, the Maya, the Moche, the Inca – these big prehistoric states all utilised human sacrifice to build and maintain their relationships with gods and men. The Moche, perhaps not an empire as such but a group of obviously networked sites occupying coastal Peru in the period before the Inca Empire, seem to have emphasised their military fierceness through the rather terrifying iconography of their ceramics and statues; these include scenes of human sacrifices as well as torture like disembowelment. The coastal cultures of Peru seem to have had some evidence of human sacrifice well before the professionalisation of the practice by the Inca, as testified by the incredibly sad evidence of a small infant buried alive as a possible foundation offering found at the ritual centre of Pachacamac. Far to the north, we have the Maya sinkholes where, beneath the water’s surface, hundreds of bodies that had been ritually cut, dismembered and probably deliberately killed have been found. While there is no real agreement on the exact nature of human sacrifice in Maya culture, their elaborate culture of personal physical sacrifice25 did culminate in practices that stacked up bodies down the cenote in the end.
More generally, the empires of Mesoamerica contained arenas for the sorts of violence we know from states all over the world. The Inca left their sacrificial victims in the cold dry air of the Andes, where they are found perfectly mummified today. Forensic testing reveals the narcotics they took with their last meals, as well as genetic and isotopic signatures of their relationships to the land and its occupants. The Aztec, who get quite a bad rap from judgemental European observers,26 may have left piles of decapitated victims alongside the fancy folk in elaborate tombs, be on record plucking beating hearts out of chests, have raided the nearby non-Aztec populations to beef up their human sacrifice counts, and once killed 4,000 people for a ribbon-cutting ceremony.27 But they also made these considerable sacrifices on behalf of their people – interpretations of murals on the sides of the great ball courts that form a centre point of Aztec cities suggest that on occasion the entire winning team of their version of basketball would be sacrificed,28 which in many cultures today would no doubt be a profound act of abnegation.
What is it about urbanised states that makes humans into disposable – if valuable – property? This is a question that I’m very interested in, and I hope that my current field work in southeastern Turkey is going to provide some of the answers. The site I work at comes from a period of social revolution in Mesopotamia. There’s always a revolution happening in Mesopotamia. Political stability does not seem to be a major feature of the region stretching from the Persian Gulf to the plains of Anatolia and the mountains of Iran. From the previously discussed development of agriculture to the resurgent insurgencies of the modern day, there is considerable backstory to the social and political upheavals that have wound up and down the length of the two great rivers that, in the words of the antiquarians, formed the ‘cradle of civilisation’. In the summer and autumn of 2015, I had the dubious privilege of experiencing two of these tremors in political instability: the first being the resurgent campaigns by the Turkish state against the banned Kurdish resistance party (PKK), and the second being the collapse of the world’s very first imperial-style network, the city-state of Uruk and its chain of colonial outposts wending up the Tigris and Euphrates all the way to the Basur River in Southeastern Turkey. While the former was ill-advised from a personal security perspective and led to an unlooked-for skill in distinguishing the distinct reports of different gauges of weapon, the latter took place 5,000 years and about 2 metres (7 feet) down.
In July of 2015 I set out with Sarah Livesey, my research assistant, to the otherwise nondescript bottom-right corner of Turkey: Siirt Province. A colleague, archaeologist Veysel Apaydin, had put me in contact with Haluk Salğlamtimur of Ege University, who was running the vast mission of excavating the archaeology threatened by the Ilisu Dam Project. In an endless series of miracle reprieves, excavations of the river valleys leading off the Tigris and into the mineral- and metal-rich northern Mesopotamian hinterlands has been ongoing for nearly a decade. It was only when a particularly radical find came up at the site of Başur Höyük, just outside the city of Siirt, that a physical anthropologist was called in. In July of 2015 that was me, frantically sandwiching planning an entirely new research project in between visa appointments and research trips to remote Greek islands.
Sarah and I arrived on one of two daily flights into Siirt Airport, hungover after a brief recon in Istanbul, bags packed full of imported gin (her) and raspberry vodka (me). We came in over a landscape indescribably alien to someone used to the broad plains of America or the gentle green undulations of continental Europe. The river valleys of Siirt in summer are endless brown, desiccated hills, so many that they look like a bed sheet that’s been scrunched together in the middle of a continent. There are mountains to the north and east, but the regular ripple of the hills, with no trees, no flats, nothing to break the monotony, is a pretty unique view. Once the little twin-engine bounced to a halt on the one-lane runway, we followed the crowd out into the single-roomed airport building, eventually emerging into the full wattage of a 45°C (113°F) Siirt summer day. Waiting to greet us were Haluk and the indispensable Man In Charge Of Things, Nescat.29 We quickly built up Team Anthro by poaching the more experienced – or possibly just masochistic – students and excavators, and with the rather crucial addition of Nil Muhafel as both assistant and translator. Thus began our adventure with the project I still insist on referring to as ‘CSI Mesopotamia’ despite the obvious dangers of copyright infringement – an incredible series of burials from the Early Bronze Age, dating back to 3100–2700 BC.
To understand the mystery we found under a good few metres of accumulated soil and debris, and why it was every bit as revolutionary as the roadblocks, gas, bombs and inescapable military presence of the modern day, we need to go back to the fourth millennium BC. In the fourth millennium BC, the world has no pyramids. There is no real written language. The most that can be said for the vaunted Urban Revolution promised by Childe is that in the several thousand years between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, we find scattered across the world small individual ‘villages’ like the walled, defensible habitations of Jericho or Banpo in China. Some of these sites might be quite big and hold a lot of people, but they’re relatively isolated, trading sporadically or with just a handful of external partners, which we can see through their unique repertoires of material goods and the limited number of exotic items their attenuated networks bring in.
In the fourth millennium BC, far to the south and almost at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, the settlement of Uruk kicked off the age of empires with a series of ugly, cheaply made bowls in a handful of standardised sizes.30 The Uruk colonies seem to have functioned basically as airport Starbucks for the industrious trade networks that funnelled raw materials into the rapidly growing city of Uruk. The standardisation of material culture found outside the actual heartland has always seemed to me to mirror the bizarre experience of walking into a familiar place in countries I have only just arrived in for the first time. We can see from the material culture at Başur Höyük that the time of Uruk came and went. But in the brief hiatus between empires, our site flourished, and the fancy tombs mentioned in Chapter 5 appear. In 2014, at the foot of the largest tomb so far uncovered, the archaeological team made a remarkable find. Several bodies, liberally coated in incredibly exotic beaded belts and necklaces, had been buried just outside a tomb door. The tomb itself was sealed to them, as it had been for more than 5,000 years, but there they lay, entwined and interred on the same level as the main burial. We know that at the roughly contemporary site of Arslantepe, far to the north and west in Anatolia, the very first signs of the practice of human sacrifice in the ancient Near East had been found in another stone tomb, this one decorated with partial teenagers in fancy hats. Just 300 years after our site, the Royal Cemetery at Ur would utterly exceed expectations and produce prolific mass burials that seem to be at least partially (if not entirely) the result of human sacrifice. The incontrovertible hundreds of human sacrifices that surround the early Egyptian pharaohs in their pyramids follow soon after.
As the project’s physical anthropologist, my job is to work out whether the bodies lying outside the fancy tombs are victims of human sacrifice by carefully examining the skeletal remains for signs of cuts, punctures, strangulation or other methods of killing; to examine the excavation record for signs that the skeletons might have been bound or otherwise arranged in such a way as to suggest that they ended up there as a job lot of sacrificial victims. As an archaeologist, my job is to question what the sudden arrival of human sacrifice in the record of human achievements means. If these are really human sacrifices, we have to ask, ‘Why here, why now?’ If we want to understand the ultimate embodiment of structural violence, we must ask what it was about the political, social and cultural situation at Başur led to the development of human sacrifice. There are many competing theories; an analysis of human sacrifice in ‘Austronesia’ (the bit of the world between the Asian continent and the Australian one) has argued that human sacrifice is in fact a driving engine in maintaining social stratification. Joseph Watts, the lead author, argues that human sacrifice in Austronesia was a way of exerting social control, to terrorise or punish in a manner akin to the judicial killing we discussed above. The power of a ‘special’ group of people, an elite, to kill others is legitimised and codified through the act of human sacrifice. Peter Turchin, on the other hand, vehemently disagrees, and points to sacrifices that can’t be interpreted as punitive, such as the gentle poisoning of the Inca children whose mummified bodies were found high up in the mountains of Peru. His argument is that if human sacrifice is such a terrific idea for stabilising your new hierarchy, everyone would be doing it; indeed, they would still be doing it. But human sacrifice has its big moment at the dawn of complex states, just like at Başur, and then fades away.
At the risk of sounding incredibly reductive, there is of course a third option: ritual. To hark back to the longstanding joke in archaeology that anything that cannot easily be identified must be ‘ritual’, and as such can be left alone while we get on with the things we do understand.31 But ritual can be read another way: as a capacity to display power, which in the tenuous world of early elite hierarchies might have been the difference between having power and not having power. Shifts in regional complexity, in the way populations and networks of populations are organised, call for new and more impressive means of display, and the rituals to fit. The concept of human sacrifice as the logical extent of hierarchical societies’ need for bling might be unpleasant, but then, so are humans in aggregate. There are many contexts in which human sacrifice has been practised in the past, but in order to understand the wide range of potential human approaches to sacrifice, we need more specific evidence. This is something I hope to address in the near future, when I return to Turkey to analyse the remains more closely.32
Violence does not have to take the rather direct, loosely equal form of a teenage fistfight, or even a bit of conflict management as in the case of the Chumash. In the previous chapter, we looked at violence between (more or less) two people, mano a mano, spatula to cranium. In this chapter, however, we’ve seen that it’s entirely possible to be at the mercy of not just a person, but in the sights of the rather more threatening people. Violence can and does regularly occur against single persons or subgroups within society, perpetrated by some socially recognised arbiter – a king, a priest, a witchfinder general – of moral or spiritual good.
The very first examples of both of these are only first observed, in whatever region they arise, with the dawn of complex urban polities. With the exception of the structural violence enacted in the domestic sphere on women and children, all of the other cases discussed in this chapter are possible only with a level of authority that comes with complex polities. Archaeologist Haagen Klaus argues that signs of violence, and of health disparities, can be interpreted as signs of structural violence (albeit carefully). He associates this with the presence of ‘rigid hierarchies’ and social complexity, both traits frequently attributed to urban life. Whether the prevailing view of cities as the forges of violence can be challenged on a purely statistical scale will have to depend on future excavation, but it’s interesting that discoveries in recent years have pushed back the start dates for evidence of mass killing and fatal conflict. One might begin to wonder, if it were easier to find the dead of small-scale societies so inconveniently lacking the sign-posting of an enormous urban ruin, would we find that the experience of violence was closer to the higher levels observed ethnographically in small bands and tribal groups? What might be true for interpersonal violence and community-on-community conflict might be very different in the case of structural violence. While there are women and children in all societies, and their abuse may not be fatal, human sacrifice is a fairly profligate use of human life. It takes a large society, with unsubtle obligations and the hierarchies that enforce them, to have the power to coerce their own citizens (or those non-citizens unfortunate enough to be caught nearby) into death.
1 He actually says ‘prevention of realisation’, but I’m trying to avoid the less sociologically inclined reader from actively contesting this definition of violence by chucking the book across the room.
2 Example: If you are of an age to have loved the film Sixteen Candles, you may have missed the horrifyingly date-rapey subtext of basically the whole plot. Times have changed. Mostly.
3 Having never misbehaved as a child, I would not know.
4 Do not look this up if you want to sleep at night.
5 Belts, first and foremost. Never give your grandparents reason to discuss how they were raised.
6 For instance, some of the recorded punishments we know of from the writings of the Dutch urban elite over last 500 years include things like the cruel, yet patently familiar, sent-to-bed-without-supper ordeal.
7 My language here is why Millennials have invented the expression ‘sorry/not sorry’.
8 Borshay Lee judged that men did more work than women by counting up time spent hunting (men), fixing stuff (men) or gathering (women). Literally nothing else is considered. Guess that water just up and gets itself, and those kids just magically grow.
9 Has.
10 Because they sure are in the present.
11 Read: spare bed.
12 Writing the methods chapter of my PhD. It seemed better to do this on a Greek Island than a dank London flat, for some reason.
13 Awkwardly, we did this in full view of Philipos, the person who had rented us the car. The one cafe in Diakofti sits at the end of the causeway and doubles as his second office. This pattern of behaviour may explain why so much archaeological field time is taken up with car trouble.
14 Getting that diagnosis correct was a serious ego-puffing moment.
15 As exemplified by my first question to an archaeologist presenting some of his work on this: ‘The hand was found where?’
16 For instance, the controversial preacher Helen Ubaiko says she can save you from witchcraft, ancestral or mermaid attack. Critics say she encourages abuse of children who are deemed to be possessed. I personally would like to see the mermaid up front before handing over any of my money.
17 Witnessing the aftermath of such an occurrence gave one acquaintance a lifelong fear of the rural part of the African country he was working in.
18 Literally, ‘penalty of the sack’.
19 And one terrifying pre-school teacher with a predilection for dioramas. How was a non-Christian kid supposed to know what to make with the two Popsicle sticks?
20 Or both.
21 Props to Ned Stark for the opportunity to demonstrate the verb form of ‘beheading’ in both active and passive case.
22 For instance, museums all over the world are full, absolutely full, of skulls without bodies. This has a lot less to do with decapitation, however, and a lot more to do with the limited interest anthropologists of an earlier era had in anything that wasn’t constructing skull morphologies and racial typologies. Not that we’ll know if any of those isolated skulls were decapitated: the necks are missing.
23 Ask the French.
24 And I bet you even they would blink. Whether this was actually empirically tested by the Inquisition in the thirteenth-century Albigensian Crusade remains unknown, but it was certainly a scientific inquiry taken up with gusto by the time of the French Revolution.
25 Critical to Maya ritual were practices like piercing the penis with a string of thorns and indulging in hallucinogenic enemas. One might pity the poor Victorian archaeologists who came across the evidence of all this and were forced to come up with something to label the enema tubes as in the catalogue of finds. Lesson being: never trust a Maya ‘fan handle’.
26 Decapitation sounds nicer than what the Inquisition would do to you. Just saying.
27 Based on historical accounts, this was the number of human sacrifices required for the re-dedication of the Templo Mayor in Mexico City.
28 Imagine basketball where you’re allowed to run on the walls, the ball can’t touch the ground, you can’t use your hands and the ball is 18 kilos (40 pounds) of solid rubber. Also, you die if you win.
29 Nescat’s roles included, but were not limited to: driver of cars, procurer of ice creams, father to the adorable small girls who once ran 3k with me in pink flip-flops, owner of bunny rabbits with a distressing fondness for sleeping in engine blocks and foreigner-retrieval manager from the shopping malls of Siirt.
30 That these unprepossessing bowls are considered one of the most exciting finds in the history of the discipline goes a long way to explaining why archaeologists are frequently disappointing conversationalists.
31 e.g. What’s Stonehenge for? Ritual! How was it made? Oh wait, I have detailed scientific explanations.
32 Assuming that the state of emergency has been lifted; having probably tempted luck sufficiently during the 2015 season, there seems no real reason to do so again until the situation is slightly more regular.