A mass grave from the 9th century containing mixed skeletal remains including the trepanned skull of an extremely tall man has been discovered on the outskirts of Cambridge, UK. A team of University of Cambridge students and professional archaeologists The find site was a frontier area between the Saxon kingdom of Mercia and East Anglia, conquered by the Vikings in 870 A.D. so the mass grave may be related to constant armed conflict in this border region in the decades after the Viking invasion.
The burial pit contained a mixture of complete articulated skeletons and bones from dismembered body parts, including scattered limbs, a stack of legs and a pile of skulls. There are at least four complete skeletons and their positions suggest they were bound before being buried. The severed heads and limbs were thrown in the pit on top of them. Based on the number of skulls, archaeologists estimate the grave contains the remains of up to 10 different individuals, all of them younger men.
One of the men thrown into the pit was exceptionally tall, about 6’5″, which more than a half foot above the average height for men in the UK today, never mind in the 9th century when the average height for an adult man was around 5’6″. He was between 17 and 24 years when he died. It was his skull that had the trepanation hole in the side. The elliptical hole is 3cm across and was evenly cut, drill or scraped with a sharp tool. The bone edges were healed, so we know he survived the operation, but the new growth conceals the evidence of what tool was used.
“The individual may have had a tumour that affected their pituitary gland and caused an excess of growth hormones,” said Dr Trish Biers, curator of the Duckworth Collections at the University of Cambridge, where these remains have been taken for further analysis.
“We can see this in the unique characteristics in the long shafts of their limb bones and elsewhere on the skeleton. Such a condition in the brain would have led to increased pressure in the skull, causing headaches that the trepanning may have been an attempt to alleviate. Not uncommon with head trauma today,” Biers said.
The mass grave was discovered just south of the ringwork of an Iron Age hillfort in Wandlebury Country Park. This is actually the second mass burial from the 8th-9th century period found at Wandlebury. The first was discovered close to the current dig site in 1976 when a tree was uprooted during a storm. It contained five skeletons, all of them complete.
The combination of complete skeletons and disarticulated remains in the recently excavated burial pit is very unusual. Only one of the heads displays chop marks on the jaw consistent with decapitation and a few other bones show signs of combat injuries, but this is too meager evidence to indicate the deceased were killed in battle.
However, to have severed heads, limbs and other remains – from ribs to pelvises – tossed in a pit, with body parts of the same type stacked together in some cases, piled on top of four dead men, at least one apparently bound, suggests terrible violence and perhaps an execution, according to CAU’s Dr Oscar Aldred.
“Those buried could have been recipients of corporal punishment, and that may be connected to Wandlebury as a sacred or well-known meeting place. It may be that some of the disarticulated body parts had previously been displayed as trophies, and were then gathered up and interred with the executed or otherwise slaughtered individuals,” Aldred said.
“We don’t see much evidence for the deliberate chopping up of some of these body parts, so they may have been in a state of decomposition and literally falling apart when they went into the pit.”
The team will now subject the bones to DNA and stable isotope analysis to find out more about the health, origins and kinship links of the deceased. They will also attempt to puzzle together the disarticulated remains to see if they can reconstruct skeletons and determine how many people’s remains are in the pit.
* This article was originally published here
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