The bones were spread out across a nearly 50-foot ditch, thousands of them7xm, bearing marks of a grisly end. Snapped femurs. Bashed skulls. Bones with slicing cuts, as if someone had butchered the skin around them.

For more than 50 years, the remains found in a shaft at the Charterhouse Warren Farm in southwest England have been a blip in British archaeological history. Discovered by cave explorers in 1970, the collection of mismatched bones seemed to be just another Bronze Age gravesite — a few victims scattered among sediment and animal skeletons.

Now, a recent study published in the Cambridge University journal Antiquity suggests a stunningly grim saga played out at Charterhouse Warren, at far greater scale than previously thought: The bones belong to at least 37 men, women and children who were slaughtered and possibly eaten in a ceremonial feast after their massacre.

Speaking in the battleground state of Pennsylvania, where Vice President Kamala Harris has a slight edge in recent polls, Mr. Trump bristled at the notion that his struggles with women voters could cost him the election and suggested that his tough talk about immigration and economic proposals would resonate with them.

“It’s taken us all aback. It was completely unexpected, totally atypical for the period and for almost all of British prehistory,” said Rick Schulting, a professor of archaeology at Oxford University who led the study.

The Charterhouse Warren site was first discovered in 1970, when cavers outside Bristol revealed skeletal human remains in a natural, 50-foot shaft, apparently killed and buried sometime between 2210 and 2010 B.C. But the cavers weren’t trained archaeologists, Mr. Schulting said, and the record of the original find was scant on clinical details. The site had largely fallen off the archaeological radar in the intervening decades, until the study by Mr. Schulting and his team.

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