Stonehenge a New Understanding by Mike Parker Pearson Page B

if people moved from one region to another after childhood, and sometimes where it was that they moved from.
    We would be able to do similar analyses on the bones and teeth of the animals that the inhabitants of the Durrington Walls village had eaten there. In certain cases our specialists in animal bones—faunal analysts—could tell us at what time of year the herds were culled. By studying the range of foods consumed and their seasonality, we could also work out whether this was a full-time or seasonal settlement.
    All the human bones that Geoff’s team found in 1967 have been radiocarbon-dated and have turned out to be much later than the time of the settlement. Our own excavations produced about eighty thousand bones but of all these, only three are human. A broken femur (upper leg bone), a skull fragment, and a toothless jaw date to the occupation of the village. The femur, belonging to an adult male, has two deep nicks in it. 11 Our human bone specialists, Andrew Chamberlain and Chris Knüsel, have identified these as arrow wounds received around the time of death.
    To suffer one leg wound in which the arrow went right to the bone was unfortunate, but to get two was really unlucky. I wondered how many other arrows had struck this individual—perhaps he’d been pierced likea pin cushion, a veritable prehistoric St. Sebastian. Had he been executed by firing squad? And where was the rest of him anyway? Like the human skull and the mandible, but unlike the animal bones, this battered leg bone had been kicking around for a very long time. Perhaps it was somebody’s trophy, kept for years until it was left in a pit with cow and pig bones and other food waste.
    Archaeologists are never surprised to find stray fragments of human bone in pits and other contexts on prehistoric sites. It may seem strange to us to keep a bit of human body lying around the house—nowadays we take great care to dispose of bodies as definitively as possible, by burying them or scattering cremated ashes, and find it hard to imagine deliberately chopping bits off to keep. It was definitely different in prehistory. From the Neolithic to the Iron Age, odd pieces of bone and skull turn up in contexts that have nothing to do with burials and funerals, often in rubbish pits and ditches, along with domestic waste and animal bones. Human remains must have been scattered on the ground around houses and villages. Some of these bones do seem to have been kept as special objects, especially skulls and long bones. Human bones weren’t “sacred” in our terms, though they had some sort of meaning for prehistoric people. To find just three human bones from among eighty thousand animal bones is surprising. It is actually a very low number for a prehistoric settlement.
    Our faunal specialists, Umberto Albarella and Sarah Viner, have much more data to work with. Umberto has gone through the 1967 finds and discovered that most of the young pigs were killed at around nine months old. He can tell this by measuring the growth and wear on the teeth within the mandible. Reckoning that, like today, pigs farrowed only once a year in Britain’s temperate climate (during the spring), Umberto has deduced that since the young pigs were killed at nine months, they were therefore killed in midwinter. To his surprise, when examining the faunal remains, he found the tips of flint arrows embedded in pig bones: At least some of these animals were shot with arrows. 12 Then the pigs were barbecued or roasted—the ends of many of their limb bones were scorched by flames while the meat was cooking.
    Such arrow injuries might be expected were the pigs in question wild boar, but there wasn’t a single wild pig among the 1967 bones—all weredomesticates. Umberto knows that in some parts of the world—New Guinea, for example—domestic pigs are shot with arrows at point-blank range when a tribe or village is putting on a feast. His results don’t tally with this possible scenario,