Excavations in a British county have revealed a gruesome glimpse of Iron Age Britain as archaeologists have found evidence of a massacre involving hundreds, if not thousands of people.
Some of the slaughtered bodies are stripped of their flesh or chopped up.
Human remains unearthed from an ancient site near Yeovil town, Somerset county, have cut marks, often in multiple rows, and occurring at the ends of important joints, The Independent reported.
“It is as if they were trying to separate pieces of the body”, according to Marcus Brittain, the Cambridge archaeologist and head of a major excavation of Britain’s largest Iron-Age hill fort, Ham Hill.
Defleshing signs, he said, have been found on other Iron-Age human remains, but the scale of the evidence at this site is particularly dramatic.
Ham Hill is the size of 123 football pitches surrounded by Iron-Age ramparts. Only a small part has so far been excavated.
"It’s unusual to find this number of bodies on any site, let alone from the Iron Age,” said Brittain.