Nearly 1,400 years ago, a woman survived two severe blows to the head. One was a clean slice from a blade. The other was a crushing fracture. She is now changing what researchers thought they knew about violence in one of early medieval Europe's most warlike cultures.
The woman is identified in research records as individual T46. Her remains were discovered in 2012 during an emergency rescue excavation at the Ferrovia cemetery in Cividale del Friuli, in northeastern Italy. According to a report by Phys.org, the excavation was triggered by urban redevelopment work in the area. The recovered bones were in poor condition, partly because later graves had cut directly through hers, leaving the skeleton broken and incomplete.
Determining her sex required protein analysis of the bones, which confirmed she was female. Her forehead showed two distinct wounds. One was a narrow gash on her left forehead. The angle and force of that wound suggested the attacker stood in front of her and struck downward, likely with a blade similar to a scramasax, a long knife used by Germanic warriors. The second wound caused a crushing fracture, consistent with a blunt object.
Both wounds showed signs of healing. That means she survived the attack and lived for years afterward.
The Langobards were an ancient Germanic people who conquered parts of Italy and Hungary and established a kingdom from roughly the 6th to the 8th century CE. Historical sources describe them as fierce and warlike. Their graves have yielded swords, knives, and bones scarred by conflict. But until T46, every confirmed case of interpersonal violence in the skeletal record had come from male individuals.
That absence was already considered odd by researchers, because Langobard legal texts told a different story. Those laws spelled out specific penalties for attacking women. Some provisions described women who voluntarily entered fights.
"The Edictum Rothari includes six provisions dealing with violence against women, covering cases ranging from husbands killing wives to women who voluntarily joined fights between men," said study co-author Valentina Martinoia, of the University of Udine. One law, Liutprand 141, describes men sending women to fight on their behalf, with a note that women would commit evil deeds "more cruelly than men might do."
Despite those legal records, no physical evidence of violence in Langobard women had ever appeared in the archaeological record. T46 is the first.
The study is published in the International Journal of Paleopathology. The findings suggest that violence in Langobard society was not strictly limited to men, and that the skeletal record up to this point may have presented an incomplete picture of life and conflict in that culture.
