2,800-year-old mass grave of women and children discovered in Serbia reveals ‘brutal, deliberate and efficient’ violence
Archaeologists have analyzed a mass grave in southeastern Europe containing the remains of women and children violently murdered 2,800 years ago. The tomb could be the key to understanding the evolution of strategic mass violence in the Early Iron Age, researchers report in a new study.
The tomb was discovered at the archaeological site of Gomolava, located near the modern town of Hrtkovci in northern Serbia. Originally founded as a settlement on the Sava River in the sixth millennium BCsedentary and mobile cultural groups have used Gomolava many times over the centuries. By the 9th century BC, semi-sedentary groups from the Carpathian Basin clustered around sites like Gomolava, creating tensions over land use and ownership.
Gomolava “found himself at a physical, political, and conceptual flashpoint” — and the consequences of these new interactions were deadly, the researchers wrote in the study published Monday (Feb. 23) in the journal Human behavior.
The researchers focused their analysis on a small mass grave in Gomolava that measured just 9.5 feet (2.9 meters) in diameter and 1.6 feet (0.5 m) deep. Archaeologists discovered holes around the burial pit, suggesting that there had been some sort of commemoration of the grave. The pit also contained ceramic vessels and small bronze accessories, as well as the bones of nearly 100 animals, including the complete skeleton of a young cow at the very bottom of the grave.
But when researchers began studying the 77 human skeletons in the pit, they discovered that more than 70 percent of the skeletons were women and 69 percent were children.
“The predominance of women and younger individuals in the Gomolava mass grave is exceptional in European prehistory,” the researchers write.
Additionally, archaeologists found extensive evidence of intentional, violent, and fatal trauma to the victims’ heads involving “close contact and particularly blunt force, which could have resulted from any number of tools or weapons,” they wrote. The attackers could be much larger than the victims or be on horseback, given the location of the injuries, the team said.
“Overall, the pattern reveals severe, brutal, deliberate, and effective violence,” the researchers wrote.
To learn more about the victims, researchers studied the behaviors of individuals. DNA. That analysis found that only a handful of the 77 people had close biological ties, suggesting the killing was not a raid on an extended family encampment. A study of the skeletons’ strontium isotope ratios – a chemical variant found in tooth enamel and influenced by geographical origin – also showed that more than a third of the inhabitants grew up outside the Gomolava region.
“It is clear that this is a heterogeneous set of individuals,” lead author of the study Linda Fibigerbioarchaeologist at the University of Edinburgh, told Live Science in an email. Gomolava was “a place where mainly women and children who had been brutally killed at the time were buried,” she explained.
But the reason for this massive violence remains elusive.
By the 9th century BC, myriad cultural groups were moving and settling in the Carpathian Basin. This population influx, coupled with tensions between mobile and sedentary lifestyles, may have created a “potentially explosive set of conflicting ideologies about land use and ownership,” the researchers wrote. This tension may have led to the forced migration or displacement of some people, the capture and killing of specific groups, and the exchange of women and children through marriage or foster care.
“There is nothing osteologically or archaeologically to indicate that these individuals were captured and held for any length of time,” Fibiger said. “We are looking at changing the structure of settlements, land use and quite possibly the power structures that accompany them.”
A second mass grave was also discovered in Gomolava in 1954. This grave contained mainly female skeletons as well as animal bones, metal objects and ceramics dating from the same time.
The two mass graves may have been intended as hoards of valuable objects and people, the researchers wrote. Women and children were essential to the survival of these communities, leading researchers to conclude that the killings of these individuals were intended to disrupt the genealogy.
“Taken together, the murderous event, the mortuary event, and the resulting monument signal a chain of actions intended to resolve or forcibly eradicate conflicts and rebalance power within or between communities,” the researchers wrote, resulting in “mass violence and an assertion of power in prehistoric Europe.”
Fibiger, L., M. Iraeta-Orbegozo, J. Koledin et al. (2026). A large mass grave dating from the Early Iron Age provides evidence of selective violence against women and children in the Carpathian Basin. Human behavior. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-025-02399-9
