Meggie Macdonald

On the BBC News website today, it was announced that a pit of dismembered skeletons has been discovered during construction work on a relief road near Weymouth in Dorset.  It has been suggested by some, including David Score of the Oxford Archaeology project, that this burial pit – dating from the end of the Iron Age to early Roman times – may contain the remains of those who died during a ‘catastrophic event’.

This announcement sounded rather like a similar report from  May 2008 about another burial pit found in Gloucester that is believed to contain victims of a plague that ravaged the Roman Empire during the reign of Antoninus Pius.  The remains, dated to the second century in a range between AD165-189, seemed to have suffered no trauma.  This led archaeologists to suggest that they were victims of a documented epidemic of small pox that swept across the Roman Empire at this time.

The two pits have the similar characteristic of containing human remains that were thrown in ‘haphazardly’, rather than being buried with care and attention.  Although the two pits differ in approximate date by nearly 150 years, it is noteworthy that Dorset, on the south coast of England and Gloucester, in the southwest near Wales roughly correspond to the vertical limit of the Roman province during this time period.  This is not to say that the Romans had not expanded right to the tip of Lands End in Cornwall, or much further north into Wales and the Midlands, but that reasonably the sphere of secure control, even if only relatively secure or controlled, exited along these two regions.

Were plague victims taken as far away from settlements as possible?  This is likely, since the understanding of disease transmission was not clear in the first two centuries AD.  Were they moved to places that people felt were unlikely to pose risks to other communities?  Were these the remains of soldiers and their families, posted to the far reaches of the southwestern edge of the province who lacked any other expedient burial method?  Could this be evidence of a mass execution of some kind? 

Once more information, specifically DNA testing of the remains to determine if they were Romans or Britons, is available, further exploration of this topic will be possible.  In the meantime, it is interesting to note that two such burial pits have been discovered in the last year in a country where inhumation is difficult in winter weather (unlike other parts of the Roman empire).  It is also interesting to note that these mass burials do not correspond with the cremation of bodies considered much less unusual for the Romans, particularly among the upper classes.  Could all this represent some kind of cultural shift previously undocumented?  Could these burials shed more light on the British influence on Roman cultural practices in the province?

Again, this writer looks forward to the publication of the archaeological efforts and analyses of the sites in Gloucester and Dorset and how they come to be used in scholarship in the coming years.