The Egyptian Skulls That May Point to Retainer Sacrifice
A new paper in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reassesses a collection of skulls excavated from Egyptian tombs in the 1920s. Over one-third of them show evidence of blunt force trauma — which, in the paper's reading, suggests they may have been victims of so-called retainer sacrifice, the burial of retainers alongside a dead ruler. That word 'may' is doing real work here: a pattern of healed or unhealed injuries on old bone can suggest a practice without proving one.
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The paper's author, Roselyn Campbell, is a bioarchaeologist at Purdue who studies how people decide which kinds of violence are acceptable, and how violence gets defined in the first place.
She also warns against importing our own definitions. Violence is context-specific, and Egypt's archaeology carries a long colonial legacy of outsiders arriving with fixed ideas about what the culture was.