Professor Rick Schulting, University of Oxford, will be giving a free Zoom lecture on Violence in Prehistory for BACAS in partnership with two other societies, Bristol and Avon (BAAS) and Bristol and Gloucestershire (BGAS), and Bristol Museum. The talk will start at 7.30pm on Wednesday 5th November. Tickets are FREE.
To book your place, visit bristolmuseums.org.uk/bristol-museum-and-art-gallery/whats-on/winter-lecture-violence-in-prehistory Sorry – this talk is now fully booked.
Violence in Prehistory
The Neolithic and Bronze Age periods have traditionally been thought of as relatively peaceful times where warfare and acts of violence rarely happened.
Yet recent studies suggest that this is not necessarily the case. So how violent was our prehistoric past?
Professor Rick Schulting has been re-assessing prehistoric skeletal collections looking at evidence of violence and the results reveal a darker side to the human species. One of these collections involves the scattered remains of at least 40 men, women and children found in a 20m-deep pit during the 1970s excavations at Charterhouse Warren, in nearby Somerset.
This Early Bronze Age assemblage featured cutmarks indicating dismemberment, alongside fracturing of long bones and injuries to skulls that took place around of shortly after the time of death. While evidence for violence is not unknown in British prehistory, nothing on this scale has been found, and the site joins a small number of Continental Neolithic and Bronze Age sites showing extreme violence and postmortem processing of human remains.
This lecture provides an overview of recent research into violence in prehistory and looks at the fascinating work on the Charterhouse Warren assemblage.
Speaker: Rick Schulting, Professor of Scientific and Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Oxford.
Please note: This lecture will include images of human remains.
Archaeology Online
This talk is part of Archaeology Online, a new series of monthly digital talks brought to you by BACAS, Bristol Museums, Bristol and Avon Archaeological Society and Bristol & Gloucestershire Archaeological Society. Places are limited to 300, but members of BACAS and the other societies get a few days to register before the general public, so book soon to avoid disappointment.