Archaeologists and students from Cambridge University have uncovered a mysterious mass grave in Cambridgeshire county. Their identities are unknown—but something awful probably happened to them.
The excavation, which included students in training, revealed a 13.1 by 3.3 feet (4 by 1 meter) pit of human remains, including the skeleton of an absurdly tall man likely dating back to sometime between 772 and 891 CE. This range of time straddles a turbulent time period for Cambridge. In fact, the context of the deaths, as well as whether they were Saxons or Vikings, remains unclear, but the archaeologists grimly suspect a mass execution.
“Cambridgeshire was a frontier zone between Mercia and East Anglia, and the continual wars between Saxons and Vikings as they clashed over territory across many decades,” Oscar Aldred, lead of the dig and an archaeologist at Cambridge Archaeological Unit, said in a university statement. “We suspect the pit may relate to these conflicts.”
Bones, bones, and more bones
The team found ten skulls, pointing to at least that many individuals in the pit. The site includes four whole skeletons, a pile of legs, and a group of bodyless skulls. Some of the complete skeletons were found in ways that indicate restraint with rope. The discovery of both whole bodies and individual body parts was unexpected.
Because they all appear to have been fairly young men who were thoughtlessly deposited, the remains might represent the result of some sort of fight—or potentially a mass execution—according to the archaeologists. Possibly both. At least one of the men was beheaded, given the mandible’s “chop marks,” among other signs of combat-like injuries. That said, there isn’t enough evidence to confirm a battle. Still, the assemblage points to brutal violence, according to 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 said. He and his team found the pit in Wandlebury Country Park, which features traces of an Iron Age (about 750 BCE to 43 CE) structure that would have turned the park into a famous early medieval gathering site.
“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,” Aldred continued. “We don’t see much evidence for the deliberate chopping up of some of these body parts, so they may have been in a state of decomposition and literally falling apart when they went into the pit.”
A very tall dead man
One of the whole skeletons was the aforementioned tall man, who died when he was somewhere between 17 and 24 years old and landed on his face when he was tossed into the mass grave. He stood about 6 feet 5 inches tall (195.6 centimeters), nearly a foot taller than the average man at the time, who measured around 5 feet 6 inches (167.6 cm). There’s a gigantic hole in his skull that shows signs of healing—evidence of the ancient and brutal surgery known as trepanation, which involved cutting into the skull.
“The individual may have had a tumour that affected their pituitary gland and caused an excess of growth hormones,” explained Trish Biers. The remains are now at the University of Cambridge’s Duckworth Collections, where Biers is curator. “We can see this in the unique characteristics in the long shafts of their limb bones and elsewhere on the skeleton. Such a condition in the brain would have led to increased pressure in the skull, causing headaches that the trepanning may have been an attempt to alleviate. Not uncommon with head trauma today,” she added.
Historical conflict
In the late 700s, Cambridge was in the grips of the Kingdom of Mercia, run by Saxons. Part of the Viking Great Army then pillaged it in approximately 874-5 CE, and the area was absorbed by the Viking kingdom of East Anglia. The mass grave might date back to when the region was smack-dab in the middle of the conflict between the two powers, and determining whether they were Vikings or Saxons will necessitate further investigations.
The team will next examine the individuals’ health, family ties, and ancestry to help clarify whether they were Vikings. Additionally, they will try to put the bodyless remains back together to get a more accurate number of the deceased.
“Before we uncovered the first remains, our best find was a 1960s Smarties lid,” said Olivia Courtney, a Cambridge University archaeology undergraduate student. “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.”
