Andrew Curry in Science:
In 2017, archaeologists digging in the middle of a Slovak wheat field uncovered four headless skeletons. The burials, in a ditch dug on the edge of a settlement more than 7000 years ago, belonged to one of Europe’s first farming communities. Burying people in or near settlements wasn’t unusual at the time—but burying them without heads was.
Year after year, the researchers have returned to find more and more headless skeletons on the outskirts of Vráble, a small village 100 kilometers east of Bratislava. “Everywhere we started to dig, we found bones. Everywhere we were sitting or standing, there were bones,” says Katharina Fuchs, a biological anthropologist at Kiel University (KU) who has excavated in Vráble every summer since 2021. In the summer of 2022, she and colleagues from KU and Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra recovered the skeletal remains of 34 people, piled on top of each other two or three deep in a space about the size of a parking spot. With the exception of one child, none of them had heads.
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