Grisly find in UK’s Peak District

London - Evidence of a hitherto unknown prehistoric war has been discovered. Archaeologists excavating a large fortified Iron Age settlement at Fin Cop in the Peak District have found the skeletons of nine victims of what they believe was a massacre which took place around 2,400 years ago.

The nine corpses - mainly women and children - had been thrown into a two-metre-deep, rock-cut ditch originally built to defend the settlement.

The archaeological investigation, led by Dr Clive Waddington of Derbyshire-based Archaeological Research Services, has revealed that the victims' skeletons and the masonry of the settlement's defensive wall were all thrown into the ditch at exactly the same time. The victims were two women in their 20s, another adult of unknown gender, four babies, one toddler - and a teenager who had been cowering at the bottom of the ditch when he or she was buried under the masonry.

Significantly, Fin Cop was probably not the only settlement to be attacked. A few miles away, Bakewell, another fortified village, appears to have been similarly destroyed. - The Independent