Skeletons found in mysterious pit died violent deaths in Anglo-Saxon-era England

Archelogists working near Cambridge, England uncovered a pit filled with skeletons. (David Matzliach/Cambridge Archaeological Unit via CNN Newsource)

LONDON — In an idyllic corner of an English field, beneath the lush green grass and yellow buttercups sprouting in the sunshine, archeologists made a grim discovery.

Sifting through the soil, they found a pit dating back around 1,200 years, filled with skeletons — some complete, some dismembered — that bore the signs of horrific, violent death.

“There’s terrible interpersonal violence going on here in whatever form we’re looking at,” said Oscar Aldred, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge who led the dig last spring and summer at Wandlebury Country Park, about three miles (4.8 kilometres) outside Cambridge, England.

The pit could contain the remnants of a battle or an execution sometime in the 8th or 9th century AD, he hypothesized to CNN, but the evidence either way is still unclear.

One of the bodies was buried face down — “a sign of huge disrespect,” Aldred said — with their arms and legs possibly tied together.

Another was almost certainly beheaded; the first vertebra of their spine was cut and there was a big cut mark on their lower jaw. Only the lower leg bones, feet and kneecaps remain of another body. And they were buried together in a single pit, which was unusual for the time as Christian custom dictated that people, even if they have been executed, were normally buried separately, Aldred said.

The archeologists didn’t find any artifacts near the bodies, either, Aldred added, suggesting that “these individuals have been stripped of any possessions and buried.”

All these factors represent “good signatures of execution,” he said, but lying on top of the four bodies, and the legs of another body, were six more skulls, suggesting “it’s not a straightforward execution.”

Aldred said he believes the four and a bit bodies were buried at the same time, and that they died after the people whose skulls are in the pit, because the skulls no longer have their lower jaws attached.

This could indicate the skulls “were maybe on display somewhere or, maybe, if it’s to do with battle, they were debris within a battle area,” before being buried in the pit, he said.

Discovering a site like this allows archaeologists to further understand the culture and society of early medieval England, when the country was fragmented into several kingdoms but rulers like Offa were beginning to unify it and Alfred the Great was fighting off Viking invaders.

There is still a lot that the archeologists hope to uncover about the bodies. They believe they are all men, but more bone analysis will confirm that, and whether they are related.

The team also want to analyze the skeletons’ teeth, which should reveal their diets and where they came from, Aldred said. Crucially, that will help the archeologists pinpoint whether these are Anglo-Saxon or Viking bodies.

More analysis will date the bodies more precisely, too, allowing the researchers to narrow down some of their theories.

If the bodies date from the 9th century, they are more likely to have been involved in a battle between the Saxons and the Vikings, Aldred said, whereas if they date from the 8th century, before the Viking invasion, it is likely they were killed as some form of justice.

Some striking details, however, are already evident. One body has a large hole in its skull, suggesting the person underwent the ancient surgery of trepanation, which was thought to help migraines, seizures and psychological disorders. The person was also 6 feet 5 inches tall, a remarkable height at a time when the average man was around 5 feet 6 inches, according to a statement released by the university.

“The individual may have had a tumour that affected their pituitary gland and caused an excess of growth hormones,” Trish Biers, curator of the Duckworth Collections in the University of Cambridge’s department of archaeology, said in a statement.

“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,” she said.

The bodies were uncovered on a training dig as part of the university’s undergraduate archeology degree. It was part of a five-year investigation into Wandlebury, which contains an Iron Age hill fort and has been occupied for 2,000 years, making it a popular site for education programs.

The team first uncovered one body, undergraduate student Grace Grandfield recalled, before going back for a follow-up dig where they found more and more skeletons.

“It was quite confusing because we weren’t expecting to find anything else,” she told CNN. “It was quite unsettling to think about just how many fragments of bone had become dislodged from the individuals and got so mixed up.”

By Issy Ronald, CNN