Finding just one skeleton with a severed head is disconcerting. Finding 77 of them in the same hole, all dating back about 7,000 years, is enough to make you think you’ve stumbled onto a cursed burial ground and accidentally unleashed something ancient that should have stayed buried.

That’s essentially what archaeologists encountered near the town of Vráble, one of the most important Neolithic excavation sites in all of Europe.

According to a new study published in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society, the 78 individual remains were discovered piled in a ditch at the edge of a large settlement. There were 78 individual bodies discovered, and 77 of them were missing their heads.

This particular area flourished between roughly 5,500 and 4,500 BCE, coinciding with the continent’s broader shift from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to a more agrarian one. The Vráble site includes evidence of more than 300 houses spread across three neighborhoods. It all paints a picture of a tightly knit farming community. This wasn’t a place ruled by violence and brutality. And yet, one of those neighborhoods was bordered by a ditch filled with 78 skeletons, all but one of which were decapitated.

Brutal Massacre or Bizarre Death Ritual?

The skeletons were all overlapping, piled on top of each other, with no discernible order. The only skeleton that kept his head had belonged to a child.

It seems like all this can be explained with some kind of horrific massacre. The researchers argue otherwise. They say that the evidence doesn’t support a violent decapitation, but rather the cut marks and bone positioning point to a very careful, very deliberate removal of the head after death, and then the bodies were buried soon thereafter.

In other words, this might have been a part of some kind of ritual.

As for where the skulls went, who knows? One theory researchers came up with is that they were stored or displayed at a second location, but that’s just a theory since no such location has been found yet. We may never fully understand the nuances of this ritual, if it even was one, since this particular people’s worldview was likely radically different from anything on earth today.

The researchers are going to be frantically analyzing the skeletons for years to come to determine who these people were, what they ate, their relations to one another (if any), and possible causes of death.