A team of archaeologists from Kiel University and the Institute of Archaeology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences unearthed an unusual mass gravemass graves suggests the Linear Pottery people entered a period of crisis around 5100 B.C. The headless burials at Vráble may have been part of a response to this upheaval. “The ritual depositions could be some kind of social coping mechanism of a magical or religious nature that people performed to get back control in a time when things seemed to be falling apart,” says archaeologist Martin Furholt. Excavation and dating of other settlements in the area show that they were being abandoned around the time the headless bodies were buried. Meanwhile, the population at Vráble was growing, perhaps a result of newcomers seeking security in an increasingly unstable world.
