I'm Will Bowden, I'm Associate Professor in Roman Archaeology at The University of Nottingham,
and we're working here at the Roman town of Caistor St Edmund just to the south of Norwich.
And what we're looking at is, we've done a whole series of geophysical surveys across
this whole field and across the walled town which is, which is behind us.
And now we're carrying out trial excavations to test the results of those geophysics, and
see if what we've found in the geophysics is actually reflected under, under the ground.
What we've found here has been rather surprising. Here we've found ourselves in the middle of
a cemetery, but it's a cemetery of rather abnormal burials, people who aren't being
buried according to the normal customs of Roman burial.
We've got a chap laying on his side, seemingly been placed rather carelessly in a pit. We've
got someone buried very deep down at the bottom of a very deep pit, and we've got a child
who's clearly suffered some quite significant head injuries at some stage during their life,
although, these injuries have at least partially healed.
So it's in the normal place that we might expect a cemetery to be, i.e. it's outside
the boundaries of the Roman town, but it's clearly a cemetery for those who for one reason
or another were treated differently. Perhaps they were individuals who were on the fringes
of society, and so who weren't accorded the normal burial rites.
Certainly on one individual the bones appear to be quite, quite distorted as if this individual
would have had certain difficulties moving around in life. But it's also the, it's also
the position of burial, the fact that they are placed not in proper grave cuts but in
pits that have clearly been dug for some other purpose, and then they've had these individuals
put in them. So the whole manner of burial is really rather, rather strange together
with the skeletal remains.
It's not impossible that some of the individuals we're seeing have been executed as criminals.
These sorts of people who are executed would very often be, not be buried in the normal
way and would be buried in different places to, to the normal cemetery. But in fact I
don't think this is really what we're, what we're seeing here. I think this is a cemetery
for people who are perceived in life as being different for one reason or another.
Have you ever in your experience come across something like this?
No, I've never dug a cemetery that's quite like, quite like this. I've really never come
across many parallels for, for this sort of cemetery. So it is really a rather exciting find.
What do, what do you do here, what's your role?
Whatever I'm told to do, basically. Like most people here without the yellow jackets, we're
the volunteers.
Why do you do it?
It's a passion, we all, I should say all of us dig somewhere else most of the year, sort
of once or twice a week we'll dig, always as volunteers. But when there is an opportunity
to do a three week, you know really get your teeth into it and see something from beginning
to end. So we're actually doing, identifying features, digging them, recording them. The
nice thing is that, normally, the skeletons are left to the paid professional archaeologists,
but they've given us a wonderful experience here in allowing us to do them.
My name's Mike Pinner. I'm a volunteer working for the Caistor project. I'm a retired teacher.
I've been involved in the Caistor project since the start of it all, involved in the
field walking and the excavation.
It's been fun and it's intriguing, and I've always really been around archaeology, so
you know to be involved in the project now is really good fun I think. The principle
find I suppose was the one that sort of surprised us most, because we were all over in this
area here about three days ago, scraping down and the pot started to appear.
So this is a pot.
This is a little pot. It's been made fairly locally. It's greyware pot, and it would have
been made somewhere between the mid first and mid second centuries.
I personally think it was made in the later first century. You can tell it's got this
lovely high shouldered profile, with this averted rim. Which means it's still, still
in touch with its iron age predecessors, but it's going into the Roman period.
And it's been used to contain burnt bone, which we have to think is burnt human bone,
as so much care was taken in placing it in a wooden box, and burying it with quite a
lot of ritual. And you've got to think a lot of what was in the graves is now, now probably
gone, probably organic things up there, are no longer, no longer found.
How interesting a find is this for you?
Well actually in, in this area in Norfolk, Roman burials are very under-represented.
Really out of the whole of Norfolk you've only got something like 50 burials which is,
well probably a few more now but really not very many when you consider the size of the
county and how much Roman archaeology we have here, and in this Roman town we have far more
Saxon burials than we have Roman burials. So finding a Roman, any Roman burial especially
a Roman cremation, is really adding to the number of burials we have, and the information
we'll be able to get from this when the bone is analysed and the soil is analysed, and
the pot is looked at more carefully will really add to our knowledge of burial customs in
Norfolk, in the early Roman period.
You're holding something that is so old.
That's lovely isn't it? That's what makes being an archaeologist exciting.
My name's Heather Wallace and I'm a professional archaeologist working in Norfolk and other
eastern counties. And I helped lift the main skeleton we had. Everything is lifted very
carefully and bagged, very carefully. Left side and right side are all kept separate,
the arm bones, the leg bones, the central bones, the ribs are separate from the spine,
and the pelvis bagged separately as well.
What will happen to it?
It will go off to the bone specialist who will do a full analysis, and look at the bones
and they'll hopefully, they should be able to identify age and gender, and also any diseases
or trauma that the bones may have suffered.
And the skeleton itself was quite extraordinary wasn't it?
The skeleton was extraordinary in that it was positioned in quite an unusual manner,
in that it was laying on its side, and I've never seen one positioned like that before.
Normally they are laying on their backs, because it's a, quite a traditional method of burial.
So the way the legs were arranged with them slightly bent, and one hand in front and one hand behind the body, yeah that's very unusual.
They're all flints. I mean these are thousands of them that we've plotted, that we've plotted
the positions of. They're all struck, struck flakes, mainly the waste product from making
flint tools, and so what we've done is, when we find them, we plot the position of them
exactly so that subsequently if we find that bits of them actually fit together, we can
start to work out how the person was actually, where the person making these things was,
was sitting and how they were, how they were doing it. Of course, you may not be able to
get any pattern out of it at all, but you have to do it because you know these are all
things you can't, there's no benefit of hindsight really in archaeology. You only get one, one
go at it, so you've got to record things as much as you, as much as you possibly can.
This is essentially a waste, a waste flake that's been taken off, taken off a core, and
then you can see, you can see here where another flake has been removed.
All archaeology tends to raise more questions than it answers, but really to fully understand
this we would have to come back and dig it on a larger, on a larger scale because really
to understand whether this is an abnormal cemetery you've also got to find the normal
cemetery, and this is the first time actual human remains have ever been excavated in
any sort of controlled fashion from this site.
And that's something that you hope to do in the future?
I think so. We have a series of specific trial excavations to carry out over the next two
to three years, and then we will reassess what parts of the site we might want to look
at, look at on a larger scale.