“Before we uncovered the first remains, our best find was a 1960s Smarties lid,” archaeology undergraduate Olivia Courtney said. “I had never encountered human remains on a dig, and I was struck by how close yet distant these people felt. We were separated by only a few years in age, but over a thousand years in time.”
The change between the trivial litter and the dead took place on a University of Cambridge training excavation near Wandlebury, approximately three miles out of Cambridge. Under a modern topography with tracks and woodland, students discovered a burial trench that was built in the 9 th century and contained the remains of at least 10 young men that were mixed up. The find lay in a more ancient environment: the Iron Age hill fort at Wandlebury where people were always attracted to it, both on the edge and at the centre, but the purpose of such visits evolved with each century.
The unorderliness of the grave was the factor that made it hard to read. Those who dug graves tallyed by skulls yet not by bodies. The pit found there had a cluster of skulls with no obvious accompanying skeletons, a “stack of legs” and four fairly complete skeletons; some of them were in positions, which indicated restraints. The set up coupled with absence of grave goods was an indication of neither ceremony nor disposal but rather disposal. According to archaeologist 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.” He added, “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.”
One was the body that invited an instant notice, not, however, due to the manner in which it was lying, face down, mixed with others, but to its size. The young man was 6 feet 5 inches tall, which made him towering at the time when the average height of men was approximately 5 feet 6 inches. There were unusual features to his bones, and the most intimate secret of all in his skull, a hole of about an inch in diameter, pierced during his lifetime.
The hole healed and this was an indication that he survived the procedure. It was consistent with trepanation, which cuts have been recorded in numerous cultures in different periods, such as the classical Mediterranean, and which was commonly associated with the historical-time effort to alleviate migraines, seizures, or other troubling symptoms. The unusual height of the man was related by curator of the Duckworth Collections, Dr Trish Biers to a probable medical case. She said that it might have been a tumor in the pituitary gland of the individual that led to surplus growth hormones. We can observe this in the peculiar features in the long shafts of their bones of the limbs, and otherwise in the skeleton. Such a state in the brain would have caused more pressure in the head resulting in the headaches that the trepanning could have been an effort to relieve. No rare thing with head injury to-day.
Evidence of violence was clearer in other bodies, such as one person who had chop marks on the jaw, which could potentially be beheaded. But the pit did not deliver the repetitive and diverse skeletal violence that was usually likely to come with close combat in a group. Aldred even wondered whether some remnants were literally rotting to pieces when placed, and indicated that the remains might have been handled, exhibited, and displayed, and subsequently all the more than once, and not buried at a single time.
The setting can be used to explain why there is no certainty. The Cambridge area was a disputed area between Mercia and East Anglia, and was subsequently dragged into a Viking-conquered East Anglia when Cambridge was raided by the Viking Great Army. Radiocarbon dating dates the bones to the ninth century but nothing in the pit could tell the year or allegiance.
And now the tale is spades to laboratory benches. Scientists are looking to do ancient DNA and isotopic analyses to uncover health, kinship, and ancestral connections, as well as test work that seeks to reassign disarticulated bones to individuals. A new geophysical survey of the area has also been commissioned by historic England in search of evidence of features that could provide answers as to why this part of an ancient hill fort had become the site where young men including one who is a medical rarity had been found together in an untidy, hastening mass.
