Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:
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Archeology students from the University of Cambridge were on a training course when they discovered a mass burial just three miles outside the city.
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Dating back to the 9th century AD, a time when the Vikings ruled the area, the tomb held the remains of at least 10 different young men.
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One set of remains belonged to an individual who would have been considered a giant in his day.
A team of Cambridge University students made a huge discovery during a training session just three miles outside the city, both figuratively and literally. The dig looked unpromising at first, but that changed with the discovery of a group burial from the 9th century en
Based on the number of skulls found among the remains, the archeology team concluded that the Wandlebury burial pit contained the bodies of at least 10 people. The most remarkable individual discovered in the pit was a man whose height, at 6 feet 5 inches, was so far above the average for his time that he would have been considered a giant. Adding to the intrigue, the giant had a surgically drilled hole in his skull.
“Before we discovered the first remains, our best find was a Smarties cap from the 1960s,” archeology graduate student Olivia Courtney said in a statement. “I had never come across human remains at a dig, and I was struck by how close yet distant these people felt. We were only a few years apart in age, but over a thousand years in time.”
The site on the outskirts of Cambridge was once a border war zone during the conflict between the Saxon-led kingdom of Mercia, which controlled the area in the late 8th century under King Offa, and the neighboring kingdom of East Anglia. Around 874, the Great Viking Army sacked the city, and Cambridgeshire was later incorporated into a Viking-ruled kingdom in East Anglia.
The burial pit was probably the result of that conflict, given that all the remains in it were of young men. The mass grave was a mixture of complete and dismembered remains, ranging from skulls without clear accompanying bodies, a pile of legs, and four complete skeletons. Some of the remains have even been found in positions that suggest they were tied together. Experts believe the young men were thrown into the pit unceremoniously, possibly after a battle or mass execution.
The “giant” was between 17 and 24 years old, face down in the pit. Considering that the average man was only 5 feet 6 inches tall in that day, the man would have been considered extremely abnormal. An inch-diameter hole in his skull indicates a trepanning procedure, which was believed at the time to relieve migraines and seizures.
“It is possible that the individual had a tumor that affected his pituitary gland and caused an excess of growth hormones,” Trish Biers, curator of the university’s Duckworth Collections, said in a statement. “We can see this in the unique features of the long branches of their limb bones and other parts of the skeleton. Such a brain condition would have increased the pressure in the skull, causing headaches that trepanning would have been an attempt to alleviate. It is not uncommon in head trauma today.”
Some of the men bore signs of battle wounds, including one who had cut marks on his jaw, indicating that he had been decapitated. The way the parts were thrown haphazardly into the pit, including ribs, pelvises and legs stacked together on top of the corpses, suggested that the burial followed some sort of mass execution.
“Those buried could have been recipients of corporal punishment, and this could be connected to Wandlebury as a sacred or well-known meeting place,” said the university’s Oscar Aldred. “Some of the disarticulated body parts may have previously been displayed as trophies and then collected and buried with the executed or otherwise slaughtered individuals.”
However, other than signs of decapitation, there is not much evidence that body parts were cut off. Aldred therefore concluded that they may have “literally fallen apart” from decomposition when they entered the pit. “Cambridgeshire was a borderland between Mercia and East Anglia and the ongoing wars between the Saxons and Vikings as they clashed over the territory over many decades,” Aldred said. “We suspect that the pit may be related to these conflicts.”
Radiocarbon dating links the bones to the 9th century, but no additional artifacts were found in the pit to help narrow down the date range. Historic England plans to commission a new geophysical survey of the area to find out more about the burial. A Cambridge team will work on bone analysis, including ancient DNA and isotopic work, to investigate health, kinship and ancestral links. The team may also try to “reassemble” to see if they can piece together the remains to get a more accurate count of the people buried.
“I never would have expected to find something like this in a student prep dig,” Grace Grandfield, a Cambridge student, said of the literally huge find. “It was a shocking contrast to the peaceful site of Wandlebury.”
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