A newly published study reports one of Europe’s largest known single-event prehistoric mass graves and concludes the victims were not killed indiscriminately.
Instead, researchers argue the ninth-century BC burial at Gomolava in northern Serbia points to selective, lethal violence that disproportionately targeted women and children during a period of political and social upheaval in the Carpathian Basin.
The researchers examined the bodies of 77 people who had been buried together in a shallow pit around 0.5 metres deep. Bioarchaeology revealed that more than half of the dead were juveniles (1–12 years old), others were adolescents, and a minority of deaths were adults.
Although sex could be determined by skeletal characteristics, ancient DNA, or enamel peptide analysis, females dominated across all age groups, particularly among adults.
Earlier interpretations had suggested a disease outbreak, but the new study reports no supporting evidence from pathogen screening. Instead, the strongest signal came from trauma: many individuals displayed unhealed, peri-mortem injuries—often to the skull—consistent with intentional violence. The patterning of blows, concentrated on the back and top of the head, suggests victims were frequently attacked from behind or while fleeing, rather than in face-to-face combat.
Genetic data provides some clarity. Low-coverage genomes from 25 individuals showed almost no close biological relationships among those buried, aside from one mother and two young daughters.
That lack of kinship contrasts with some other prehistoric massacre sites and indicates the dead were unlikely to be a single household or even one small settlement. Isotope analyses reinforced this: strontium ratios and dietary signatures varied widely, implying that many victims grew up and lived in different places and followed different foodways before ending up together at Gomolava.
It looks like the burial itself was very carefully staged. The grave had been adorned with ceramics and bronze ornaments, animal remains—including a young cow placed beneath the human bodies—and deposits of food such as quern fragments and burnt seeds.
Collectively, the researchers state that Gomolava is a record of cross-regional conflict in which perpetrators targeted specific demographic groups — women and the young — presumably with goals to disrupt social networks, reproduction, labour, and the continuity of the community.
And besides documenting brutality, the study positions women and children not as incidental victims but as key players in the social and economic stakes of power in later European prehistory.
Sources : Nature – https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-025-02399-9
