Severed Heads in Iron Age Iberia Weren’t Just War Trophies, New Research Suggests

Iron Age people living on the Iberian Peninsula in the last millennium BCE had a striking funerary tradition: chopping off people’s heads and hanging them in prominent places—sometimes with a giant nail hammered through the skull. Archaeologists, however, aren’t sure who got beheaded: was it a ritual of veneration for important community members, or a stark warning for enemies?

To investigate this question, a team of European researchers analyzed seven severed heads from two archaeological sites in Spain to determine whether the beheaded individuals were locals or outsiders to these ancient settlements. Local origins would imply a funerary custom for respected members of the community, whereas the severed heads of outsiders may have served as a threatening symbol of power. Interestingly, the researchers found evidence for both hypotheses, suggesting that funerary decapitation traditions varied from community to community, and even within individual settlements.

“Our premise in approaching the study was that if [the severed heads] were war trophies they would not come from the sites analyzed, while if they were venerated individuals, these would most likely be local,” Rubén de la Fuente-Seoane, an archaeologist at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB), said in a statement. He’s also the first author of the study, published February 13 in the Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.

The researchers conducted isotopic analyses (a methodology used to study ancient human diets, environments, and movement) on seven severed heads from Puig Castellar and Ullastret: respectively, an ancient Iberian settlement and city on the northeastern coast of modern-day Spain. Both sites were abandoned between the end of the third century and the beginning of the second century BCE, likely in connection to the Roman invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, according to the study.

The analyses indicated that three of the four severed heads from Puig Castellar were probably non-local individuals. Additionally, all the Puig Castellar heads had been discovered “near the inner face of the wall, beyond the main entrance of the settlement,” the researchers wrote in the study. This points to “an interest in making these remains visible,” they added. On the basis of these two elements, Fuente-Seoane and his colleagues theorize that those three severed heads were likely war trophies meant to ward off both external and internal enemies.

As for the three severed heads from Ullastret, they “revealed a mixture of local and non-local origins,” Fuente-Seoane continued in the statement. Two of the three severed heads were likely local and had been discovered on a city street, implying they may have hung on the walls or doors of homes, “suggesting that the exposed remains would be important inhabitants of the settlement, possibly venerated or vindicated by society,” the researchers explained in the study.

The third head, on the other hand, was likely an outsider and had been discovered in a pit—a potential storage site for enemy heads, according to the researchers.

Ultimately, the study indicates “that the practice of [displaying] severed heads was applied in a different way at each site, which seems to rule out a homogeneous symbolic expression,” said Fuente-Seoane. In other words, the funerary tradition of decapitation was more complex than scholars previously thought. “But more research is needed to be sure.”

Their research nevertheless sheds light on an ancient culture that has otherwise left few archaeological traces of their societal organization.