(content warning: violent death)

My family lived in Wassenaar in the Netherlands the year I turned 13, in 1979 and 1980. It is 10 km northeast of the Hague, about halfway to Leiden, and these days it is a dormitory town for the larger cities nearby. In international relations, it gives its name to the 1996 Wassenaar Arrangement on arms control. Earlier it was the location of the first of the South Moluccan terrorist attacks of the 1970s, when 33 Ambonese activists occupied the Indonesian ambassador’s residence and held the ambassador and staff hostage (they surrendered peacefully with no casualties).

Visiting the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden last year, Anne and I came across this extraordinary montage of skeletons found in the dunes of Wassenaar in 1987.

It is a mass grave, dating from the Bronze Age, containing the bodies of twelve individuals:

• three men in their 30s
• two younger men in their late teens or early 20s
• a woman in her 20s
• an adult man whose body was too poorly preserved to establish his age
• an adult whose body was too poorly preserved to establish age and gender, though the position matches that of the known adult woman so researchers think this was another woman
• an adolescent in their mid teens
• a child aged about ten or eleven
• two small children, one aged about three and the other about two.

I put up a spoiler warning about violent death at the top, so I’ll say it now: the head of the three-year-old was separated from the rest of the child’s body, though whether this was at the time of death or subsequently cannot be known. There was an arrowhead inside the body of one of the men. Three of the other men’s bones showed evidence of injuries from edged weapons. It seems a pretty fair assumption that all twelve of these people died a closely related set of violent deaths.

Carbon dating of charcoal found in and near the grave gives a date of 1700 BC, the upper middle Bronze Age, when the dunes were becoming fertile as the post Ice Age sea receded. Most known burials from the Netherlands at that time are cremations, so these people are exceptions. It is also notable that two of the bodies (one of them the only definite adult woman) were buried face down, and the three youngest were placed lying on their sides. They appear to have been set in the grave in order, as Leendert Louwe Kooijmans puts it: “central are the two stretched adult males, accompanied by juveniles, with (young) adults on either side and the women with the very young children at the edge”.

It’s fascinating as well as gruesome. One can construct all kinds of scenarios. The big thing that we do not know is, how large was the population unit in which the twelve victims lived? If it was a village of twenty or so, this was a grievous blow from which the settlement probably would not have recovered. I tend to think that this was the case; if it had been a larger settlement, there would have been enough people left to organise the standard cremation and burial in a barrow. This grave looks hasty, though also careful and respectful, which points to the burial being organised by the relatives of the dead, rather than by their enemies.

I find it suggestive that there are only one or two adult women in the grave, compared to six or seven adult men. More women must have survived; if it was a small settlement, the mature women may have been the only adult survivors, and would have dug the grave and buried the bodies. Also none of the dead was older than 40; were there older people who escaped? I also tend to think that there must have been more children around than the four teens and pre-teens who are here. Perhaps the dead children were part of the most high-status family in the settlement, and were targeted by the attackers.

And that in turn makes me wonder briefly if this was an inside job, eliminating a particular family and dynasty from the politics of a slightly larger tribe. Dynastic massacres are not unknown to history, but twelve is a lot even by more recent standards, especially with the limited technology of the Bronze Age. Also the arrowhead is suggestive – that’s battlefield technology rather than a weapon of stealthy assassination.

We cannot take it much further than that. The evidence points to a raid on a village, perhaps targeting a particular family, perhaps just killing everyone in the first hut or huts they came to; the survivors’ first task after the defeat was to bury their dead, whether as free agents or under the compulsion of the winning group. Everybody who actually knew what happened has been dead for 3,700 years.

The two papers I drew on for this post are “An Early/Middle Bronze Age Multiple Burial at Wassenaar” (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia, 1993), by Leendert Louwe Kooijmans and “An Early/Middle Bronze Age Common Grave at Wassenaar, the Netherlands. The Palaeopathological Evidence” (Analecta Praehistorica Leidensia, 1996) by Elisabeth Smits and George Maat. But most important of all, you can see the aftermath of the massacre at the Museum of Antiquities in Leiden; mute testimony to unknowable violence of millennia ago.