Our latest discovery was a Smarties lid in the 1960s, the best find we had before we unearthed the first remains, which, to say the least, gave a whiplash, leading an archaeology student, Olivia Courtney, to face the ninth century.
The excavation was made at Wandlebury, a wooded rise near the south of Cambridge where a more ancient scene is pressing near the surface. The discovery made was in the Iron Age hill fort area, however, and it was discovered just beyond the hill fort: a narrow burial pit, approximately 13 feet in length, excavated into the ground like an afterthought and having been filled seemingly as no one had any expectation that the burial pit would ever be visited again.
There were no fewer than 10 young men in there, but not in individual arrangement. There were four skeletons which were more or less complete. In other places skulls were found, without the bodies which had previously supported them; bones of legs were piled upon each other; fragments of ribs and pelvis had been discovered abroad. It is this combination of articulated bodies and disarticulated parts that bothered the excavators in a way that the violence suggested by the bones did. However, based on the pattern, archaeologist Dr. Oscar Aldred of University of Cambridge argues that people were deposited in haste and that some of their remains might have been already detached through previous handling or display or by decomposition instead of careful cutting. Some particulars sharpened up that picture: one man had chop marks on the jaw that pointed to beheading, and at least one of the poses indicated the binding.
The setting matters. Wandlebury is located in an area that was constantly dominated as the Mercia forces, East Anglia, and Scandinavian forces battled over who would be in control by the end of the eighth and ninth centuries. Cambridge and the country came to be a sort of seam line a government was overrun, a people rebuilt, a system reestablished, until the region was incorporated in the Danelaw. The bones are found to correspond to that turbulent interval: the results of radiocarbon dating place the remains between the ninth and ninth centuries and one series has been put between 772 and 891. Having no serious items to mend identities, the pit does not read as much a named episode and more as the infrastructure of fear-punishment executed at the location where people would memorize it.
Some of the people we discovered were of my own age, and that was a strange experience, student Grace Grandfield said, to find people of my age, who were on the other side of a thousand years.
One of these contemporaries remained remarkable even after his death. The man in the bottom of the pit was between 6 feet 5 inches, which is seen to have been extremely tall of his time, when many adult men were in the average five-foot area. Northern raiders were sometimes said by medieval writers to be towering; when Ibn Fadlan met Rus traders in 921 he wrote, I have never seen more perfect physical specimens, tall as date palms, blonde and ruddy… a phrase which has been retained at “tall as date palms”. But the legend is typically being restored by osteology to the human size, most Scandinavian male averages being estimated in the 160s to the 170s centimeters. It is on that context that Wandlebury person can be viewed as an outlier, not a stereotype brought to life.
His skull is a second shock, an oval shape, around one inch, which is in keeping with trepanation, the cutting of bone through to relieve pressure. Cambridge osteologist Trish Biers associated the oddity of the limb-bone structure of the man with possible pituitary overgrowth, which could be a source of raised intracranial pressure and headaches. In that respect, the hole is a silent homage to care and competence: someone has tried a process, which demanded rigidity, experience, and time, long before the body was casually disposed of in a busy gravesite.
More investigation, such as ancient DNA, and “re-fitting” fragments to determine the actual number of people, might help answer the question of whether the dead were locals, incomers or some combination. In the meantime the wonder of engineering, besides the old surgery, is the new one: the students and experts copying a broken human record with piled-up legs, fragments of skulls and one, miraculously improbable giant.
