Archaeologists recently discovered a head pierced by a large spike.
Archaeologists in the United Kingdom have uncovered a Roman-era burial site adorned with an intricately buried Roman-era mercury burial with his sword and a mysterious beheaded skeleton.
The Vale of Glamorgan council in Wales hired Rubin Heritage Services to assess a road they wanted to be straightened.
It led to the discovery of an extensive trove of archaeological artifacts and hundreds of graves dating back thousands of years.
Roman skeletons in one section of the five-mile road were a collection of Roman artifacts and several skeletons, Mark Collard, the managing director of Rubin Heritage who is leading the project, told Inside Archaeology.
One is believed to be a military burial, buried with a large sword and a military brooch, dated to the period that the “Roman Empire fell apart in Britain,” Collard said.
Nearby was another skeleton of a decapitated man, buried with his head by his feet.
In 2019, in a Roman graveyard in Suffolk, England, archaeologists found the same corporal condition in 17 decapitated skeletons whose heads had been removed after death, it’s believed.
The find left “archaeologists scratching their heads,” reported Live Science.
It remains a mystery what the practice symbolized. One theory suggests the symbols give a pagan belief system of pre-Roman Celtic tribes, who considered the head was the container for the soul, archaeologists told Live Science.
Both men in Wales were buried on a large hill with “fantastic views over the countryside. You have to think there must be a reason for that,” Collard told Inside Archaeology.
An ancient burial site
Collard said another excavated section of the road revealed a burial ground from a late prehistoric burial ground, uncovered by Collard and his team, that holds 450 bodies.
People returned to the burial ground for roughly 500 years — from the sixth to the thirteenth century — to bury their loved ones there. “It’s unusual that they’re buried efficiently in the middle of a field. It’s not near a church. And that’s one of the things we’re puzzling about why people would go back for burying people at the top of this mound,” said Collard.
The team is undertaking a detailed analysis of the remains, checking for family links to the bodies, signs of diseases or injuries, or clues about diets.
The detailed findings will be published at the end of 2022.
“Archaeologists always say, we didn’t expect to find this much, and in this case, we really didn’t, because the previous surveys didn’t reveal many hopes,” Collard said.
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