New analyzes of 2000-year-old Celtic skeletons, discovered around 60 years ago in the Cornaux region, suggest that their death was due to a tsunami. But researchers also do not exclude the possibility that they were ritually executed.
By investigating the cause of the death of these 20 people, researchers want to acquire new knowledge about Celtic culture in Switzerland and northern Italy, the Swiss National Fund (SNSF) said in a press release on Monday. Their work has just been published in the specialist journal Scientific Reports.
Most of the sources written about them come from Julius Caesar. “As these stories come from a military adversary, they are not always objective and complete,” explains the first author of the study Zita Laffranchi, from the University of Bern, cited in the press release.
Tsunami or sacrifice?
Since the discovery of the ruins of the Celtic bridge of Cornaux and the twenty skeletons in 1965, during work to redevelop the Thielle canal, specialists have been divided on the manner in which these people perished. Two theses clash: the first asserts that a sudden flood or a tsunami caused the collapse of the bridge. The other postulates that the corpses are the remains of human sacrifices.
The demographic makeup of the victims – mostly young men – suggests that they could have been a group of sacrificed prisoners or slaves, the researchers note. On the other hand, the good state of preservation of the skeletons indicates that the bodies were quickly buried under the sediments after their death, which would have happened in the event of a tsunami. The entanglement between certain bones and pieces of wood also supports this thesis.
According to the researchers, it is also possible that not all the deaths occurred at the same time. Both theses could therefore also be valid. /ATS
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