The Dales Road Decapitations

I am a student (for a few more weeks at least) at the University of Roehampton in south-west London and have recently just finished my dissertation on Decapitation in Romano-British Burial, possibly one of the most difficult things to investigate. For this I was investigating examples of Romano-British burials, typically from the fourth century AD in which the head was removed, usually post-mortem, and placed somewhere around the lower body. In my dissertation I concluded that there is no way to determine the motive for the decapitation with certainty and that we should not assume that it was done as a mark of disrespect.

So here I am, trying to figure it out... again...

We shall start in the Summer of 2011 where I had done a work placement at Colchester Castle identifying artefacts found by members of the public. While I was there that it was suggested that I go to Ipswich Museum in Suffolk as it had some interesting finds from the Roman era. A year later when I was looking for a dissertation topic I went down to Ipswich to see the museum. Whilst there I found out about a nearby Roman cemetery which had a particularly strange burial rite. The skeletons of 6 Roman females had had their heads removed and placed between their feet. This seemed intriguing as there appeared no apparent reason for the decapitations so I decided to investigate further.

The first point of reference was the publication from the original excavation of the skeletons in 1933. Due to the time at which the excavation took place the information can be sparse due to the less rigorous excavation and recording techniques of the time, but I will detail what has been recorded.





Map showing the north-west of Ipswich. The red highlighted
area is where the cemetery was excavated.

The cemetery site is located about a quarter of a mile from the site of a Roman villa at a place called Castle Hill, Ipswich. There are also some comparatively "normal" burials at the site. Pottery found with the "normal" burials is contemporary in date to that found at the villa site; this would suggest that the two were linked. There were no grave goods found with the decapitated skeletons but this not very unusual for late Roman burials. David Petts puts the amount of late Roman burials with grave goods to be below 5% (Petts (1997) 115).

The decapitated skeletons are orientated East-West with their legs pointing towards the latter end; this is typical of Christian custom. All but one of the "normal" skeletons were placed in this position, the one exception was placed North-South. The skeletons, including the decapitations, were also placed supine (lying on their back) with their hands placed over their pelvises; this is the typical way of burying bodies respectfully. Apart from the decapitation, their burials appear to show little other special treatment. If the burials were orientated differently we could expect the women to have been of a different religion to the general population, perhaps pagans. Bodies buried prone (face down) would suggest disrespect, perhaps to a criminal, but neither of these is apparent.

Another non-decapitated burial from the cemetery had two humanly-flaked flints of neolithic origin under each hand and under the pelvic region. It is possible that the Roman population perceived these objects to be some kind of talisman but this can only be speculated.

Analysis of the jaws of the skeletons seems to suggest a poor diet which is likely to have caused the owners intolerable pain during life. However, the archaeological record of the dig does not provide enough description as to which skeletons were suffering from this affliction, whether decapitated or non-decapitated. If we knew that the decapitations showed a higher preponderance of dental damage, such as lesions and abscesses which would cause pain, we could surmise that this was linked with the decapitations. For instance it has been suggested that because of the Roman belief in ghosts, they feared that someone who had experienced great pain in life may return and haunt the living. Therefore, the decapitation may be a method to lay a ghost, similar to the tradition of putting a stake through a heart to stop a vampire from rising. However, as the information does not distinguish between the skeletons it is not possible to suggest an explanation from this data.

A vessel containing cremated human remains was found close to one of the decapitated skeletons. This is unusual for the time period as cremation was no longer the traditional form of burial in the later half of the Roman Empire.

As can be seen, the issue of decapitation is very complicated. The fact that the decapitation has taken place would first suggest that these people were treated with a degree of disrespect but in comparison to other graves they do not appear to be treated so. Nothing about body alignment, grave goods or health suggests that these people were treated in a particularly different way which would distinguish them from the general population. To further research this we will look at other burials to see what is going on.

Well, I hope that's enough information for you today to give you a first example of decapitations in Romano-British burial. In my next blog post I will be investigating the decapitated skeletons at Little Keep near Dorchester in Dorset.

Sources Used 

Moir, J. R. & Maynard, G., (1933) 'The Roman Villa at Castle Hill, Whitton, Ipswich' Proceedings of the Suffolk Institute of Archaeology and Natural History, 21 (Part 3) pp.240-262.
Petts, D., Burial and Gender in Late- and Sub-Roman Britain. In: C. Forcey, J. Hawthorne and R. Witcher (eds) (1997) Proceedings of the Seventh Annual Theoretical Roman Archaeology Conference Nottingham, Oxford: Oxbow Books. pp. 112-124.