Violent death in Kadruka-23 Neolithic cemetery

International audience The Kadruka-23 burial ground in Upper-Nubia (Sudan, Northern State, Dongola Reach) is being excavated since 2014. It counts, up to now, 158 burials, organized as a genuine cemetery, and is dated from the second quarter of the 5th Millenium BCE. The overall mortality profile is pointing to a natural, "attritional" mortality: The burial-ground includes every age-group and both sexes, without any kind of selection, and is consistent with an typical ancient mortality. Yet three of the buried individuals are showing clear marks of violence. Two women and one man, all middle-aged, show perimortem fractures and they died because of those blunt-force traumas related to interpersonal or organised violence. Those lethal blows are located on the cranium (several blows in one case), inside the pelvis (inner part of the ilium of os coxae), and inside the abdomen (reaching the last thoracic vertebrae and damaging abdominal aorta). In most of the cases, we can reconstruct the edge of the blunt instrument which seems to have been a stone hand axe very similar to those that can be found in other tombs as grave goods. Those subjects are clearly part of the group : As far as funerary practices are concerned, those three assaulted individuals are fully integrated within the cemetery, with the same grave-goods and burial practices as all the others.