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New dating evidence from the burials found at the Iron Age hillfort of Maiden Castle, in Dorset, has revealed that they were interred over a period of a century or more, and were not all from one mass casualty evident.
Since Mortimer Wheeler first excavated Maiden Castle during the 1930s, it has become synonymous with Iron Age resistance against Roman invasion – with Wheeler interpreting the burials found there as a mass war grave. More recently, however, further archaeological evidence has shown that Maiden Castle, along with other hillforts in the south-west, had been abandoned for over a century before the Roman conquest in AD 43. Additionally, four different types of burial were found on the site, which modern archaeologists have hypothesised reflect changing burial practices over time. This raised the questions, who were these individuals, and when and why were they buried there?
To answer this, Martin Smith, Miles Russell, and Paul Cheetham from Bournemouth University carried out a radiocarbon dating programme on 20 skeletons from the site, including 15 from what Wheeler dubbed the ‘Belgic War Cemetery’ – an area of the east gate that contained individuals with an excessive number of sharp, blunt, and penetrative injuries, most of which had occurred at or around their time of death.
The results showed that most of the burials at the site occurred between the 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD, all well after the hillfort had ceased use as a defensive structure, and that there was no temporal difference between the various burial types. There were three broad groupings, however: the first, consisting of three burials excavated from the wider ramparts, dated to the mid-1st century BC; the second group, which comprised the majority of burials, including most of Wheeler’s ‘war’ cemetery, dated to between the final decades of the 1st century BC and first half of the 1st century AD; and the third group, consisting of another three burials, dated from the late 1st to mid-2nd century AD.
The team then turned to Bayesian analysis to help further elucidate the chronology of burials. This tightened the probable span of burial activity, showing that the majority of burials dated from the first half of the 1st century AD, and that they were not all from one event but accumulated incrementally over time. More significantly, many of the individuals who presented with injuries dated to the second decade of the 1st century AD, before the Roman invasion. The results also confirmed that there was no temporal sequence in the burial types and that these different funerary traditions were, for the most part, contemporary with each other.
Isotope analysis provided some clues as well, showing that the diet of these individuals consisted primarily of meat. This is in contrast with results from nearby Poundbury, a site broadly of the same date as Maiden Castle, which showed individuals there had a more plant-based diet. Combined with the fact that grave goods found with some of the burials at Maiden Castle were of high status, the results suggest that this abandoned hillfort became the burial place for local Durotrigian ‘nobility’, and perhaps especially for those who died violently.
Overall, the results paint a picture of a culture in flux in the decades before the Roman invasion. With warring burial practices and excessive levels of violence, it does not appear that this was a peaceable time in the history of the Durotriges. As the researchers outline in their recent paper, published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology (https://doi.org/10.1111/ojoa.12324): ‘In associating the cemetery with a Roman attack… Wheeler missed an intriguing proposition, namely that the individuals derived from different, though no less dramatic, forms of violence enacted in the final years of the pre-Roman Iron Age. Whether this related to raiding, dispute resolution, or dynastic conflict, it is clear that those interred in the east gate died in episodic periods of bloodshed which may have been the results of localised social turmoil. 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-1st century AD.’
Text: Kathryn Krakowka / Photo: Jo and Sue Crane
