Chilling secret of mass ‘gangland-style executions’ finally revealed as experts analyse over 50 Iron Age skeletons
A MASS grave of more than 50 skeletons has cast light on tribal warfare in Iron Age Britain, where gangs engaged in bloody turf wars.
Historians previously believed mass slaughter events involving hill fort tribes in the west country were caused by invading Romans.
But radiocarbon dating of human remains unearthed in 1936 have revealed the victims were actually killed a century before the Romans arrived.
Researchers believe "localised gangland infighting" was actually behind the killings, which happened to be at one of Europe's biggest hill forts, the reported.
"We can now say quite categorically that these individuals died a long time before the Romans arrived and over a long period of time, not in single battle for a hill fort," Dr Miles Russell, principal academic in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University, said in a statement.
The Romans didn't arrive in Dorset until 43AD.
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Cut marks on the victims suggest they were killed by "lethal weapon injuries" - and in very public displays.
Experts say their deaths could have acted as a warning to others not to fall out of line.
Dr Russell, who has spent several years researching the burial site at Maiden Castle near Dorchester, added: "The deaths were a series of gangland-style executions.
"People were dragged up there and put to death as a way of one group exerting control over another."
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The executions took place between the late first century BC to the early first century AD - suggesting the violence was lethal across multiple generations.
"These were Mafia-like families. Game of Thrones-like barons with one dynasty wiping out another to control trade links and protection rackets for power," Dr Russell continued.
"What we are seeing is the people who lost out being executed.
"Most of them had cranial trauma with no sign of defensive wounds. They were repeatedly struck with a sword to the head with the skulls smashed to oblivion.
"You are talking overkill, not a single death blow. These were gangland executions carried out in a very prominent and obvious way as a warning to others."
The Maiden Castle grave site is one of the most famous archaeological discoveries in Britain.
When it was unearthed in 1936, dig director Sir Mortimer Wheeler suggested the injuries were "the marks of battle" with the Romans.
The misinterpretation of the Maiden Castle site, dubbed the "war cemetery", brings into question how other archaeological cemeteries across the south west have been understood.
