Ancient Greek and Roman authors wrote of Iron Age human sacrifices, in which victims were stabbed and fortunes were told from the way their blood gushed out.
Now actual physical proof of such barbaric ritual killings has been discovered in a field in Dorset, an Iron Age site that is just over 2,000 years old – part of an excavation that is offering new insights into early Britons before, during and after the Roman invasion.
Archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of a young adult woman, lying face down, having been thrown on to an artificially-constructed platform, with her throat cut in an apparent public performance.
The excavation, at Winterborne Kingston, near Bere Regis, is headed by Dr Miles Russell, principal academic in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at Bournemouth University in Dorset, who told the Daily Mail: ‘We’re seeing some individual who’s been executed in front of an audience. It’s been done in a very theatrical way.’
The woman’s brutal death echoes a report on such sacrifices by Diodorus Siculus, the Greek historian, who wrote in the 1st century BC: ‘They have philosophers and theologians who are held in much honour and are called Druids… When they attempt divination upon important matters they practice a strange and incredible custom, for they kill a man by a knife-stab in the region above the midriff, and after his fall they foretell the future by the convulsions of his limbs and the pouring of his blood, a form of divination in which they have full confidence, as it is of old tradition.’
Dr Russell said: ‘The Romans also wrote of such human sacrifice. They disapproved of it. They were more than happy to do it for entertainment in the arena, but they didn’t like it for religious purposes – fantastically hypocritical, really.
‘In the past, we’ve sometimes looked at these ancient texts and thought this is negative propaganda, the Romans trying to demonise their enemy.
‘It’s quite clear that there is actual evidence of human sacrifice. Here we’re seeing some individual who’s been executed in front of an audience, thrown into a pit and then left to die.’
Iron Age ritual: Archaeologists have unearthed the skeletal remains of a young adult woman, lying face down, having been thrown on to a platform with her throat cut
The excavation took place at Winterborne Kingston, near Bere Regis, in Dorset
The woman had had ‘a very hard life’, he said. ‘Her ribs had been broken about a month before she was killed. She was about 25 to 30 years old.
‘It’s difficult to know the conditions under which these people were killed. Was it a time of bad harvest? Was it a time of political danger?’
Finding one human sacrifice victim is ‘spectacular’, he said, but the archaeologists have realised that another woman and a man, whose remains were unearthed at the site in earlier excavations, had died in similarly brutal ways, suggesting that they too were sacrificed victims.
Dr Russell added: ‘It’s exactly the same kind of conditions, the same variables, the same kind of injuries.
‘They died violently, thrown down on to an artificially-constructed platform. We’ve got a whole series of animal bones, collected together to create a flat platform at the bottom of the pit – and then the bodies have been thrown on top of that…
‘Finding three [human sacrifices] within a small area of investigation makes you think how many there [might be here].
‘The Romans may actually have been right, that human sacrifice is something that Britons did on quite a regular basis. It’s not negative propaganda after all…
‘We know a lot about life in Britain after the Roman invasion. But we do not have anything written about life before, the answers to how they lived coming solely from what we find in the ground. So these discoveries are all the more significant.’
Ancient Greek sources suggested the victims were killed for divination purposes. This is a male victim
All the human remains will undergo further testing at Bournemouth and Dublin universities
Two of the skeletons have so far been dated to between 100BC and 50 BC.
The site was originally enclosed by a ditch and rampart, a type of settlement known as a ‘banjo enclosure’ due to its distinctive shape.
Over five weeks, a team of staff and students from Bournemouth University excavated the site with local volunteers.
All the human remains will undergo further testing at Bournemouth and Dublin universities, to help learn more about life in early Roman Dorset.
The team will return to the site next summer to carry out further excavations of the land nearby.
The excavation will feature in More 4’s forthcoming documentary series, Hidden Wonders, co-presented by Sandi Toksvig and archaeologist Raksha Dave, and released on November 4.
