Bronze Age combat victims at Tormarton
In 1968 the bodies of three men were found in Tormarton. They had been killed in the distant past with bronze spears. Further excavations in 1999 and 2000 revealed more about this grizzly event.
In 1968, following the insertion of a gas pipeline at West Littleton Down, Dick Knight discovered the skeletons of three men. What made these remains so unusual is that two of them displayed combat wounds. Spear wounds were present in two of the pelvises with one spear still embedded in the bone. A further hole was visible in one of the men's skulls and a bronze spearhead transfixed his spine. The skeletons were all taken to Bristol City Museum where they are still located.
In 1999 and 2000 further excavation work took place on the site and found that the bodies had been thrown into part of a 60m long ditch. More remains were found and, following a study of the skeletal remains, it now appears that five young men were deposited in the ditch. Although only two of the bodies displayed signs of violence, the fact that they had all been buried in the same place - by a quick filling in of the ditch, would indicate that they had all been killed in a single episode in the middle Bronze Age, some three-and-a-half thousand years ago.
Environmental samples reveal that the ditch had been dug into an area of recently-cleared woodland and was then rapidly filled after the bodies were thrown in. A working hypothesis is that these men had made a territorial claim through the digging of this ditch. Their claim was disputed however and they were killed, the ditch then acting as their grave. The ditches of this period are often very long, running for many kilometres through the landscape – good examples can be seen on Salisbury Plain and near Quarley Hill in Hampshire. The fact that this ditch, although cut with a well-constructed terminal, is only 60m long might indicate that their endeavours were incomplete when the men were killed.
Although there are flint arrowheads embedded in early Bronze Age burials, for example at Stonehenge and at Barrow Hills in Oxfordshire and there is a late Bronze Age spearhead embedded in the pelvis of a skeleton at Queensford Mill, Dorchester (also in Oxfordshire) the remains at Tormarton are probably the best evidence for Bronze Age combat in Britain.
On a wider level there is a Bronze Age burial at Hernádkak in Hungary which has a bronze spear piercing its pelvis and a series of burials of middle Bronze Age combat victims from Wassenaar in the Netherlands.