Humans as Ritual Victims in the Later Prehistory of Western Europe

The paper presented here addresses the issue of how far current evidence permits the admittance of ritual murder or human sacrifice in the European Iron Age. It argues from two basic premises: firstly that the notion of human sacrifice is the more acceptable within the context of strictly hierarchical, slave-owning societies for whom human life was not, of itself, sacrosanct; secondly that, since there is a solid body of both literary and archaeological evidence for human sacrifice in antiquity, there is no intrinsic reason to deny its presence in later European prehistory. However, scrutiny of the data reveals that, if human sacrifice did take place in Iron Age Europe, it appears to have been both rare and special. More importantly, virtually all the evidence has a measure of ambiguity and is capable of alternative interpretation.