Skeleton assembled from multiple individuals thousands of years apart identified in Roman cemetery

A skeleton discovered in a Gallo-Roman cemetery in Pommerœul, Belgium, has been revealed to be a composite of Late Neolithic bones from multiple individuals and a Roman-era cranium. Researchers found that the composite skeleton was put together during the Neolithic era in a burial that was then reworked 2,500 years later with a new cranium and new grave goods.

While post-burial rearrangement of skeletal remains are well-documented on the archaeological record of Europe as far back as the Paleolithic, the usual practices include secondary burial, moving skeletons and bone removal for ritual purposes. Skeletons assembled from bones of different individuals to look like a single individual are much more rare, with only two known examples from Bronze Age sites in Scotland.

The grave in Pommerœul was first excavated in the 1970s, the only inhumation in a cemetery of 76 cremation burials. The cremation burials date to the 2nd-3rd centuries A.D., but the inhumation was buried in a deeper layer and was buried on their right side with flexed legs, not in the typical position from the Roman period which was supine with extended lower limbs. A Roman bone pin was found near the cranium, however, so archaeologists concluded that the individual was buried during the Gallo-Roman period just in an atypical arrangement.

The remains from the cemetery were recently reexamined, and while the bones fragments from the cremation burials date to the Roman period as expected, radiocarbon analysis of the inhumed bones returned a Late Neolithic date range, albeit with a significant variance between them. The earliest side of the ranges was 2675 B.C. and the oldest 3333 B.C., so the composite was made from bones from three distinct periods covering more than 600 years.

Osteological assessment found metatarsals and phalanges (feet and toe bones) belonging to seven individuals, five adult, two non-adult. DNA taken from the long bones and cranium indicate they came from at least five individuals. It wasn’t possible to determine if there was overlap between the five and the seven contributing individuals. Just to make it even more jumbled, there were three badger bones from three different badgers in the mix. The badger bones were even older than the humans, in ranges from 5971–5746 B.C. and 3625–3375 B.C.

The cranium could not be radiocarbon dated, but the bone pin found next to it dates to 69–210 A.D. and DNA kinship analysis found that the cranium’s owner was related to two children buried in less than 100 miles away between 211 and 335 A.D., so it is definitely Roman. It is also female.

Researchers propose two possible hypotheses to explain this extraordinary burial.

One possibility is that the composite inhumation was disturbed during the interment of cremations during the Gallo-Roman period. Either there was originally no cranium and the Roman community that discovered the burial added one to complete the ‘individual’, or they replaced the existing Neolithic-date cranium with a Roman-period one. In either case, the pin seems to have been added, perhaps as a grave good, at this time. There are documented cases of activity in the Roman period disturbing tombs from earlier times but the recutting of graves is not attested elsewhere. A second possibility is that the entire ‘individual’ was assembled during the Gallo-Roman period, combining locally sourced Neolithic bones with a Roman-period cranium. If so, to our knowledge, this would be the first Roman grave in which a new ‘individual’ was assembled from prehistoric and Roman bones.

Given the right side burial with flexed legs which is unknown in the region during the Gallo-Roman period but well-attested in the Neolithic, the first possibility seems the most likely.

The research has been published in the journal Antiquity and can be read here.

* This article was originally published here