presently underway in England is a construction project forHS2(“High Speed 2 ” ) , an heroic , in high spirits - speed , high - capacity railway organization that , according to its website , “ will form the anchor of Britain ’s transport meshwork . ” But before HS2 move the country into the time to come , they want to ensure they did n’t inadvertently efface the past tense , so theyassembledteams of archaeologists to excavate along planned railway routes .
Their latest uncovering is the trace of an ancient Roman township in Fleet Marston , a flyspeck settlement slightly under an minute ’s driveway northeast of Oxford . Apparently , it used to be quite a happening place : There seems to have been tidy sum of commerce , as show by the more than 1200 gold coins and several lead weights come up at the site . sure sections of the road were especially all-inclusive , which , according to anHS2 news release , could mean that a market was held there , as the superfluous space would have put up extra room for carts and stalls .
Other artifact — including spoons , clayware , and even a lead dice — suggest that the town was n’t just a commercial epicenter ; people lived there , too . This is also supported by the discovery of a burial site in which research worker uncovered around 425 Stephanie Graf . Though some of the deceased had been cremated , most soundbox were bury integral . And for about 10 percent of all the interment , the skull were detached from the relaxation of their skeletal frame . Some had been placed next to the person ’s foundation or between their leg .
AsLive Science reports , the circumstance of these beheading are something of a enigma . Britain vaunt a amazingly large proportion of decapitation burial compared to other voice of the Roman Empire — twounearthed in Suffolk circa 2019were children — and some experts believe cutting the head off corpses was a funerary rite . That say , behead was afairly common form of executionduring the geological era , and there ’s a respectable fortune at least some of Fleet Marston ’s headless former occupier had been penalise for crimes . In either case , there may be a spiritual reason for lay the heads so far from their necks : to keep the dead from coming back to ghost their living counterparts .
“ No mention of the practice is made in Latin lit , but folklore and mythology from other times and places across Europe systematically suggest that heads were bring down off and localise by the groundwork post - mortem to silence uneasy spirits or to prevent dead bodies from turn out from the grave , ” University of Cambridge archeologist wrote in a2021 studyabout a group of similar grave excavate in Cambridgeshire .
Executed outlaw would n’t necessarily have been denied this motion , since Roman police force prescribe that their bodies be returned to loved ones . As Rob Wiseman , who co - author the 2021 study , told Live Science , “ families were presumptively more potential than not to have yield their relatives a normal burial . ”
[ h / tLive Science ]
