Infants in Roman York buried in Tyrian purple

Two babies buried in ancient Roman York were wrapped in cloth of Tyrian purple with gold thread, the apex of luxury in the Roman world. This is the first discovery of the sumptuous purple dye, worth three times the cost of gold, in York, and one of only a few examples found anywhere in the UK.

Researchers at the University of York made the rare find in two gypsum burials in the collections of the York Museums Trust. Gypsum burial is a funerary practice in which the clothed body of the deceased was placed in a limestone or lead coffin and liquid gypsum was poured over it. When the gypsum hardened, it captured an impression of the clothing, body shapes, shrouds and the coffin’s interior sides that preserved the position and contours of the contents after they decayed.

There are no references to in ancient sources to explain the practice. The deceased were men, women, adults and children; the only thing they have in common demographically in social status, as only the wealthy could afford the coffins and gypsum treatment. Traces of aromatic resins imported from the Mediterranean and Arabian peninsula found in some of the burials confirm the use of exotic, expensive materials that were only available to the elite.

Examples of gypsum burials have been found in Europe and North Africa, so it wasn’t specific to one culture, but the greatest number of them have been discovered in Britain, with the a notable concentration of about 45 burials in and around York. The University of York has been studying, analyzing and scanning the gypsum casts in the York Museums Trust collection for years.

The Tyrian purple traces were found in two of the York burials dating from the late 3rd or early 4th century A.D. One of the babies was wrapped in textiles and buried between the legs of two adults in a stone sarcophagus, now on display in the Yorkshire Museum. The other infant was wrapped in two layers of textiles and buried in their own lead coffin. The imprint shows the baby was wrapped in a tasseled shawl first, and then a second textile, finely woven with Tyrian purple and gold threads. This combination of the dye and gold marks it as a fabric of the highest possible luxury in the Roman imperial period.

The dye was incredibly labor and resource-intensive to produce. It is derived from the mucus of the hypobranchial glands of the two species of Murex sea snails. About 12,000 of them needed to be collected and crushed to produce less than two grams of pigment. Its preciousness made it subject to sumptuary laws controlling who was even allowed to buy it, whether they could afford it or not, since the Roman Republic.

That such an opulent material was used to enshroud a baby no more than a few months old when they died contradicts previous assumptions about how Romans did not care for dead infants in the same way they did for adults. Child mortality was high — three out of 10 infants died before their first birthday — and Roman laws and funerary customs forbade public mourning for infants. But the luxurious textile of purple and gold wrapping the baby would have been unmistakable when the child was placed in the coffin.

Professor Maureen Carroll, Project Director from the Department of Archaeology at the University of York, said, “For the first time we now have confirmation of the use of this costly dye in Roman York, indicating that the city’s wealthy inhabitants had access to expensive and exotic commodities from the other end of the empire.

“This remarkable discovery tells us a lot about the importance of children in Roman York and the willingness of the family to give their baby the best possible send-off in tragic circumstances.”

* This article was originally published here