There’s nothing quite like a good horror story from the distant past to put a shiver down the spine. And one of Britain’s most horrifying episodes from the Roman era was revealed in Dorset in 1936 with the discovery of the Maiden Castle ‘war cemetery’.
Archaeologists Tessa and Mortimer Wheeler unearthed a large number of adult skeletons by the hillfort’s east gate, an unusually high proportion of them showing unmistakeable marks of violence to the head and upper body. It seemed clear to Mortimer Wheeler that they had been killed in a bloody battle defending the fort from Roman attackers sometime in the mid-first century AD.
"The dead had met a violent, sometimes savagely violent end," Wheeler declared. "Surely no poor relic in the soil of Britain was ever more fraught with high tragedy." His vivid account of the attack on the hillfort and the slaughter of its defenders by invading Romans was accepted as fact and became a seminal event in Britain’s ‘Island Story’.
"Surely no poor relic in the soil of Britain was ever more fraught with high tragedy."
Except it turns out now that the battle and massacre almost certainly didn’t happen. At least that’s the conclusion drawn in a paper just published by three academics from the Department of Archaeology and Anthropology at Bournemouth University.
By using modern radiocarbon dating techniques and studying the differences between the methods of burial at the site, Martin Smith, Dr Miles Russell and Paul Cheetham have established that the dead there did not meet their ends at the same time. Rather, they seem to have been buried over a number of decades in the early to mid-first century.
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The Roman massacre that never happened
The study’s Dig Director, Dr Miles Russell observed, "Since the 1930s, the story of Britons fighting Romans at one of the largest hillforts in the country has become a fixture in historical literature. With the Second World War fast approaching, no one was really prepared to question the results. Unfortunately, the archaeological evidence now points to it being untrue."
So, how did the owners of these skeletons actually meet their untimely deaths? Well, we can rule out capital punishment. "The degree of care taken, and reverence implied in the style of burials," the authors say, "would appear inconsistent with execution."
Instead, they believe that the individuals buried at Maiden Castle were the victims of violence that occurred in the years before the coming of the Romans, perhaps through raids, the clash of dynasties or the resolution of disputes through force. "This was a case of Britons killing Britons, the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification," Dr Russell added. "The Roman army committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them."
The study goes on to state that "ironically, perhaps, it would appear that acts of interpersonal Iron Age violence ended within a generation or so following the formal establishment of a Roman province in the mid first century AD."
The work at Maiden Castle also brings into question how other archaeological cemeteries across the UK have been interpreted. After all, for nearly a hundred years, Britons have believed that the Romans were perpetrators of a massacre at Maiden Castle. Now it appears they may actually have stopped the locals from killing each other. Pax Romana in action!
Main image: Two of the skeletons excavated by Mortimer Wheeler in the 1930s, dating from the 1st century AD. Credit: Martin Smith
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