Some 9,000 years ago, residents of one of the world's first large farming communities were also among the first humans to experience some of the perils of modern urban living. Scientists studying the...
In a dark crypt that lies beneath an active parish church in England, the remains of thousands of men, women and children who died in medieval Britain are stuffed into crates and stacked on wooden...
Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute via Science Daily Buried alive. Butchered. Decapitated. Hacked. Mutilated. Killed. Archaeologist Samuel K. Lothrop did not obfuscate when describing what he...
By Kathleen McGarvey / University of Rochester Our popular ideas of the chivalric world are off base, according to historian Richard Kaeuper. The gallant knights on horseback and banners unfurling...
The Romans were not afraid of getting graphic if it would incite fear and compliance in their enemies. X-rays and laser analysis of Roman carvings reveal that disturbing images of captive and...
Did war exist in Neolithic times? There is some controversy surrounding this idea, however it is known that violence took place. Archaeologists debate on exactly how much this happened, the nature...
Healed over fractured skulls and limbs and a dislocated elbow – these are signs that archaeologists are interpreting as evidence of ritual violence having taken place in Peru about 3,200 years ago...
A new study suggests that medieval London was notorious for its excessive violence. The overall findings suggest that violence affected many parts of medieval London, although predictably it...
Wendy Doniger / The Conversation Just this past June, at a national meeting of various Hindu organizations in India, a popular preacher, Sadhvi Saraswati, suggested that those who consumed beef...
In 1600 B.C., there was no Internet, no television, and no printing press – how then could someone spread a message? For the ancient peoples of northern Peru, the answer was to carve reliefs into...
There is significant variation in how different cultures over time have dealt with the dead. Yet, at a very basic level, funerals in the Sonoran Desert thousands of years ago were similar to what...
The Spanish Inquisition has a reputation for having been very bloody and cruel. However, in some regions of Spain their actions were barely visible and were focused on heretics but not witches. Most...
The world’s earliest known mass-homicide grave of 27 adults and children shot with arrows and bludgeoned to death about 10,000 years ago has been found west of Lake Nataruk in Kenya. The authors of a...
The Iroquois, known also as the Haudenosaunee (which means People Building a Long House ), were a powerful and important Native American confederacy located in the northeastern part of North America...
About 6,000 years ago in France some hostiles in an apparent act of warfare and trophy-taking killed a group of adults and children, amputated their arms and buried the limbs in a circular pit...
America’s Wild West may have been just as wild before the white man arrived with horses, guns and liquor. Analysis of more than 16,000 skeletons of Native Americans buried across 2,500 years shows...
Archaeologists from the University of Mainz in Germany have discovered a mass grave at Schoeneck-Kilianstaedten, near Frankfurt. The discovery may be evidence of an ancient massacre and dates to...
The lure of the [Viking] raid was… more than booty; it was about winning and preserving power through the enchantment of travel and the doing of deeds. Thus states a new paper by an archaeologists...
A deliberate homicide so old that it predates Homo sapiens has come to light in Spain. Researchers piecing together skulls and skeletons from the Sima de los Huesos (Pit of Bones) cave say one skull...
There is a debate among archaeologists, anthropologists and psychologists about whether prehistoric people were violent and warlike or whether there was widespread peace in prehistory. A new...
The earlier Stone Age seems to have been a time of peace and not war, says an anthropologist specializing in war who has studied the published work of dozens of researchers. Unfortunately for many...
New research has revealed that parts of the American southwest experienced unprecedented levels of violence around 800 years ago, according to a news release in Live Science . The new study published...
One day... there would come a time, when the earth being ravaged and polluted, the forests being destroyed, the birds would fall from the air, the waters would be blackened, the fish being poisoned...
A report in the Journal of Archaeological Science published earlier this year revealed grisly evidence of beheadings and brutality inflicted upon the Roman Empire’s gladiators, criminals and war...
