Flood protection takes many forms, from the levees of Louisiana to the drains of East Anglia. Some villages in bronze age Europe may have had a more unusual barrier: a circle of skulls.
Researchers from Basel University have found children’s skulls at the edge of lake settlements vulnerable to flooding, dating to the ninth century BC. As flooding became worse, villages in the Circum-Alpine region in what is now Germany and Switzerland started building defences. These included log palisades, houses on stilts, and flood walls reinforced with stone and skulls.
The children do not appear to have been human sacrifices. Rather, their skulls seem to have been buried after death, then dug up years later and repositioned in what looks like a form of apotropaic magic, to create a spiritual boundary to keep harm away with symbolic objects.
The villages were occupied for thousands of years, and while they were occasionally abandoned for a time owing to flooding, the occupants kept returning. The ring of skulls appeared close to the end of the final period of occupation, and archaeologists theorise this was a last, desperate measure to appease the water gods.
There is no documentary evidence for the flood protection theory, which remains speculative. But the inhabitants surely felt a compelling reason to make such a powerful gesture.
