Funerary practices have evolved a lot over human history, but the underlying idea has been that we like to honor the dead. But there are always exceptions—which are also often the most unsettling stories from long ago.

During the Iron and Viking Age, humans living in modern-day Scandinavia were “infamous” for their “warrior ideology,” according to a recent paper published in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. However, actual findings from cemeteries dated to this period didn’t necessarily show that much physical trauma, a discrepancy that the team sought to address. For the study, researchers studied what they call a “neglected” dataset of bones found in and around domestic places.

Compared to others living at the same time, these individuals showed what the researchers called unusually high levels of trauma before or around the time of death—painting a picture of structural, slow violence experienced by marginalized groups. The analysis pointed to some seriously gruesome stories, such as a small boy with several sharp-force traumas, possibly from a sword or a sharp weapon. His bones were then placed between two floor phases of a house, meaning its inhabitants “would routinely have walked across the later floor with the child’s partial cranium under their feet,” according to the paper.

“This means that someone has walked over a child’s skull day after day,” Marianne Hem Eriksen, the study’s first author and an archaeologist with the National Museum of Denmark, said in a translated statement (via Google).

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