The Poetics of Massacre in Copper Age Croatia: Integrative Analysis of the Mass Grave at Potočani

Sometime around 4200 cal BCE, near the current town of Požega in eastern Croatia, a group of at least 41 individuals were killed and buried together in a pit. The pit was uncovered in 2007 by accident due to erosion caused by heavy rains. These remains, dating to the Copper Age, have been subjected to bioarchaeological analysis (Janković et al., 2017, 2021; Janković & Novak, 2018) as well as biochemical (McClure et al., 2019) and genetic analyses (Novak et al., 2021), providing a unique opportunity to understand a single episode of violence from multiple angles. In this chapter, we seek to contextualize this massacre within a Poetics model (Whitehead, 2004a, 2007), specifically examining the role of demography in massacre and the role of massacre in the development and negotiation/renegotiation of group identity.