Human Sacrifice in Ancient Britain

WARNING: This episode contains descriptions of graphic violence from the start. When we picture human sacrifice in ancient Britain, the iconic, flaming Wicker Man often comes to mind. But how much of this is Roman propaganda, and what does the actual archaeology reveal? Tristan Hughes is joined by archaeologist Dr. Miles Russell to separate popular myth from gruesome reality. From perfectly preserved bog bodies in the north to mysterious grain pit burials down south, who were these victims and why did they die? Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio & video editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Robin McConnell. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ The Ancients is now on YouTube! Watch HERE https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast Want even MORE Ancients? Sign up to History Hit for early access ad-free, plus exclusive subscriber-only episodes. PLUS with a History Hit subscription you can watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

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• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

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• 0:32Speaker 01

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• 1:17Tristan Hughes?

  Sacrificing animals to the gods was a common feature of ancient cultures. Classical writers claim the Celtic peoples of Western Europe went further, that they sacrificed humans. But the religious rites of ancient Britain remain a mystery. Without written evidence from the Britons themselves, we don't know exactly what they thought their sacred duties were and what value they placed on human life. Archaeology can help to fill gaps in the written record. And today, I'm joined by my good old friend, Dr Miles Russell from Bournemouth University, to take on a contentious question. Did the people of Iron Age Britain and Ireland really sacrifice humans to their gods?

• 2:01Tristan Hughes?

  Or have our ancestors been horribly misrepresented?

• 2:16Tristan Hughes?

  Miles, always great to see you. Welcome to the show.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:20Tristan Hughes?

  First, I've got to say, you've just come off your latest dig, Loving the Beard, very much an archaeology vibe I'm getting straight away.

• 2:27Speaker 02

  More sort of Robinson Crusoe, I think.

• 2:30Tristan Hughes?

  But shall we also mention your t-shirt? You've got Dura Trigus. So what is that?

• 2:34Speaker 02

  I'm officially branded, yes, yeah. So our Dura Trigus project over the last 17 years have been looking at the understanding of the Iron Age tribe just prior to the Romans arriving. So the Dura Trigus have got a very distinctive cultural impact with their burials, with their settlement types. So we're just trying to understand what happens when the Romans arrive and how Roman did they become? And the answer is not at all.

• 2:55Tristan Hughes?

  And also, well, so no doubt we're going to be covering them in our chat today about human sacrifice.

• 3:01Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 3:02Tristan Hughes?

  Because this is the thing now, it's so difficult sometimes to to see something that's clearly human sacrifice in the surviving archaeological record. But you get those interesting insights into what may well have been human sacrifice in the Iron Age from Britain.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  You do. I mean, lots of Roman writers described the Britons as performing lots of acts of human sacrifice. And a lot of the time, I guess, we've looked at those classical sources and thought they are just demonizing an enemy. There is kind of negative propaganda that anyone puts out. You don't, you don't want your opponents to sound like nice guys. So they commit acts of human sacrifice as well as painting themselves blue and

• 3:40Tristan Hughes?

  Cannibalism and stuff like that.

• 3:41Speaker 02

  Cannibalism, marrying their, their sisters and sticking horse urine in their hair. All this kind of stuff that the Britons, you know, we're told do, that makes them alien, outlandish and odd and clearly sort of barbaric. So there's lots of descriptions. Julius Caesar, particularly when he's describing the Gauls of Northern France and the Britons, talks about human sacrifice. And the fact that this shows that the, these barbarians, that their religions are so primitive and crude. And that's what the Romans need to stamp out. You know, they need to bring their idea of civilisation to these poor benighted natives who are committing all kinds of atrocities upon themselves. But finding archaeological evidence for that is very difficult.

• 4:23Tristan Hughes?

  Is this also where we get the idea of a wicker man from?

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, that's really thanks to Caesar. He describes, I think, one particular tribe as, as the way of getting rid of criminals is having a mass sacrifice where they pack men and women into this sort of big wicker work figure and then ignite it and just burn people alive. So we don't know whether this is something that Caesar saw or whether he heard of or whether it even happened. But it's one of those sort of big mass sacrifice activities that the Romans, I mean, I think partly it's to titillate their own audience, you know, they entertain the Romans and think, oh, you know, this is the kind of wanton atrocities that these barbarians commit. So we don't know whether that's true. There's certainly no archaeological evidence that's been discovered yet of a wicker man.

• 5:09Speaker 02

  But it's one of those deep-seated things that we think of when we hear about human sacrifice.

• 5:13Tristan Hughes?

  And the Romans really liked that idea. And there are several writers, Caesar's just the first who mentions kind of infers that they had these great kind of wooden things that they'd send set alight with people within, right?

• 5:23Speaker 02

  Yes, and that fact that it's the Druids, it's some kind of priestly class within the Gauls of the Germans, even the Spaniards, we're told, that have human sacrifice. The, every different tribe has its own curious way, whether it's burning or whether it's stabbing somebody in the throat and then watching the limbs contort, or whether it's hanging or drowning. But there are all these various different ways in which, I mean, it's usually some aspect of cutting open and looking at the entrails. And what I find, not particularly wonderful, but what I find really interesting is that the Romans are very keen to say, this is horrific. Killing people for religion is bad. But the Romans, of course, commit mass atrocities for entertainment.

• 6:05Speaker 02

  You know, you think of gladiators, you think of the kind of people being ripped alive by panthers or being burnt alive. Crucifixion, you know, things of the tens of thousands that the Romans regularly crucify as a public statement as a warning, they would view that as execution. Well, they're not doing it to the gods. And I think that's the key thing is that their feeling is killing somebody to appease gods is wrong. That's the wrong kind of god. That's the wrong kind of activity. But killing people for entertainment, that's fine.

• 6:35Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, human sacrifice versus public execution, you know, midday during an event at the amphitheatre, at the arena in the Roman world. What's good, what's right and what's not?

• 6:47Speaker 02

  I mean, yeah, as a matter of scale, I don't want to defend human sacrifice. But if you are killing one person in an event to the gods, surely that's preferable than killing thousands in front of a banging mob. But the Romans don't see it that way. They've got their own sort of curious of cultural blindness as far as that's concerned. They think that killing for religion is something that should be outlawed, should be stamped on and removed.

• 7:10Tristan Hughes?

  Going on to the archaeology to figure out whether there actually was any human sacrifice or not in Britain, whether it's an invention by the Romans to smear them. Archaeologically, how difficult is it to look at human remains and to say clearly, this is evidence of human sacrifice?

• 7:29Speaker 02

  Well, what complicates it in Britain is the fact there's actually relatively few individuals make it into the burial record. So there are some areas like the Dura Trigus of Dorset, areas in eastern Yorkshire where you get large infumation burials, as we will recognise, so skeletons complete. And you can look at injuries sustained on that person. But for the vast part of late Iron Age Britain, we don't get that quantity of skeletal remains. So you'd say about 99% of the population are not appearing in the archaeological record. So perhaps they're being cremated, perhaps there's some kind of exposure burial, perhaps they're being placed in rivers or bogs or somewhere where archaeologists can't recover those remains. So straight away, we're not getting anything like a complete burial record.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  So finding people who have been sacrificed is very difficult. We do find individuals who have sustained injuries. Sometimes these are put down to war cemeteries or battle graves. There's a number of hill forts in the sort of southern part of Britain, like Danbury, that Barry Cunliffe excavated in the 1970s and 80s, and Maiden Castle that Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler excavated in the 1930s. And there, there are some skeletons that have major cranial trauma. But it's difficult to say, are these executions? Are these people who've died in single combat? Are they sacrifices? So it is very, very difficult. I think the best evidence that we've got, it's fairly limited in Britain,

• 8:56Speaker 02

  but across Ireland into southern Scandinavia is the so-called bog bodies, where you get very well-preserved individuals. And it's very clear that these have been killed in a way, it's not a simple execution, but there's some kind of performative act that's been conducted on these people.

• 9:12Tristan Hughes?

  Well, let's explore the bog bodies first of all, and then we'll delve into some particular burials that might also show evidence of sacrifice that you've been working on. And bogs, first of all, give us a bit of an idea, Miles.

• 9:27Tristan Hughes?

  What area of the world are we talking about where you see lots of bogs? Why are they so prevalent in a place like Britain?

• 9:32Speaker 02

  Well, only prevalent in certain areas where you've sort of got restrictive sort of water flow, where you get sort of very boggy deposits. If you think of these as sort of liminal spaces where people aren't essentially living, but they are going to perhaps to extract iron or they're extracting peat. But these are, I think, when we're looking at in the late Iron Age, it's watery places, it's rivers and bogs, which form the edge of specific territories. And it's in these places that you often find prestigious objects. You think of the River Thames, some of our best examples of late Iron Age metalwork have come from the Thames because they've been effectively sacrificed their, the Iron Age communities have thrown ceremonial shields and swords and helmets.

• 10:15Speaker 02

  It might be that the water's perceived to be a portal to another world. If you believe your gods inhabit the ground and the waters, then by dropping something into the river, it's lost, it's entered the realm of the divine. So I think straight away, there's something special about those kind of environments. And it's intriguing when we look at certainly the settlements that we've been digging. In Dorset, it's very clear that these people don't eat fish. They don't eat anything from the sea or from the rivers. That's not in their diet at all. The Romans love shellfish, the Romans love all kinds of things from marine resources. Iron Age people don't. And it might be if you're dropping your dead or your special object, if you think your deity's reside in the river, you do not eat what comes out of the river.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  And I think bogs also occupy that kind of liminal strange space in which deities are there. You can place things in a bog, it gets swallowed up, it gets lost. The divine, that you know, your gods have taken control of that object, be it a person, an animal, or sort of some kind of prestigious artefact, it's been claimed. If you leave it on a mountain, you can still see it's there, but if it goes into the water, it's gone.

• 11:23Tristan Hughes?

  It's gone.

• 11:23Speaker 02

  So I think there's that sense that watery spaces are very, very special. And that's where we find our best examples of sacrificed objects, animals and people.

• 11:34Tristan Hughes?

  I guess it's also interesting with bogs, the fact, I remember talking to Melanie Giles about this last year. The fact that almost like rivers where you can see the flow, you can see movement happening in the rivers. So you get a sense of almost life in this liminal zone. Bogs aren't stationary things, they grow, they take more of the environment as time goes on. So people living nearer bog will be able to see it, you know, grow and, bubble's probably the wrong word, but you know, I mean, it also looks like it's alive as well.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  It is alive, yeah, in a way that sort of the chalkland or sort of another arable area isn't. Crops grow from it, but the ground itself is static. Well, you're right, the bog, sometimes it's almost sense, you can see it breathing because it's a real feeling that it is alive.

• 12:17Tristan Hughes?

  And so do we think this is something that stems all the way back from the early Iron Age? Dare I say the Bronze Age before, that these places have been important, liminal zones?

• 12:27Speaker 02

  I think, yeah, you certainly do get quite a lot of Bronze Age metalwork from watery places as well. But I think in the Iron Age, certainly we get towards the later Iron Age, the importance of these, it might be that if a river is at the border of a territory, by dropping things into it, you are somehow increasing the spiritual nature of that barrier. You are the protection zone from your own environment. Of course, the water's bringing you, you know, the actual waters of life and so on. But I think there's this feeling that as you go into the late Iron Age, bogs, rivers, even the sea are becoming far more important in a spiritual sense.

• 13:00Tristan Hughes?

  And the examples we have surviving from bogs of human bodies from the late Iron Age, do we have a lot of examples surviving from Britain and Ireland?

• 13:09Speaker 02

  Quite a few from Ireland, lots from Denmark and southern Scandinavia. Of course, the most famous one from England is Lindell Mann, currently from Cheshire. He's one of a small, limited number of bog bodies. Of course, the great thing about a bog deposit as anaerobic conditions, you don't get organics decaying to the same degree as elsewhere. So you do get skin, you get flesh, you get textiles, you get a whole range of organic preservation that you don't get. So we do get complete sort of leathery bodies coming out. But most have been recovered through peat digging. So they're not being recovered through careful archaeological examination.

• 13:51Speaker 02

  So a lot of bog bodies recovered, they're incomplete because they've been hit by spades or they've been hit by sort of machinery. So Lindell Mann is a classic example, we're missing his lower half. So we don't know where that's gone, but the upper half is well preserved, gives us a very clear idea of this individual, but also the mode in which he was killed.

• 14:10Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we explore that now? So Lindell Mann's the most famous one and he also might have a link to human sacrifice. So tell us about this figure of Lindell Mann, what we know from his remains.

• 14:21Speaker 02

  The key thing is we've got an individual who seems to be well looked after, he's got nicely sort of trimmed fingernails, he's got nicely looked after hair. He seems to be relatively well fed, he's died violently. This is not a simple case of murder or execution. He's died what some describe as a three or in his case probably a fourfold death in that he's naked. I mean, all the bog bodies as recovered across whole northwestern Europe seem to be naked as they've gone into the bog. One or two have got a cap, some have got a little bit of sort of some kind of fur scarf or something or armouring, but essentially they've been, clothes have been removed from them. They've probably been walked alive into the bog. It's very, very difficult to drag a dead body into a bog to the bottom.

• 15:06Speaker 02

  So they've probably been marched into the bog, knowing that they're going to die. Of course, we don't know whether they've accepted that or whether they've gone struggling. But then with Lindell Mann, he seems, someone seems to have struck him violently across the head. So there is, his skull's been fractured and part of the bone has sort of gone into the, into the brain case. He's then had his throat cut and he's been garrotted. That seems a bit overkill, but there is a real sort of sense, if you're killing somebody, and I'll give you ideas Tristan, but if you're killing someone and trying to do it in a theatrical way, you want to make the blood spurt further. So his throat's been cut, but the actual application of a ligature and a tourniquet, it tightens the neck, it makes the blood spurt further.

• 15:50Speaker 02

  And Melanie Giles, as you mentioned, has now, has described very sort of viscerally that the way in which that kind of death excites an audience because it is, you know, it's that sense of, you're not seeing somebody die, but they're doing it in the most explosive way imaginable, the most theatrical way. So someone's tightening this from behind, creating this massive area of blood flow. Then he's being placed face down into the bog and he's probably still alive at this stage.

• 16:18Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh.

• 16:18Speaker 02

  Because they were finding a lot of water in the lungs. So there's a suggestion that not only is he being concussed, he's had his throat cut, he's been strangled and then he's finally been drowned. So that might be, if you've got four types of death, you've got, might have four people involved in the killing. But it's a, it's a real over the top way of executing somebody, arguably in front of an audience to make it viscerally exciting, but also to sort of demonstrate that this person is definitely dead.

• 16:49Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh, and you can imagine as horrific as it is, probably, you know, ritual meaning behind each stage of that killing. You know, there's very much a process behind it.

• 17:00Speaker 02

  It is, and also of course, we don't know who that person was within their community. I mean, were they a priest? Were they a leader? Were they somebody from a neighbouring community who's somehow considered less important?

• 17:14Tristan Hughes?

  Were they a prisoner?

• 17:15Speaker 02

  Yes, it could be a prisoner of war. There's been some suggestion, you know, in his stomach cakes, he's got relatively simple sort of oat cakes, but there's also traces of mistletoe, which there's some suggestion, certainly with their Scandinavian bog bodies, that they've been fed ergot, which is this fungal growth on crops, which is, creates this kind of psychological imbalance. It's a very psychoactive drug. So these are people who might be, and that might be the case with the mistletoe, that there's some sense of altering their mind state before they're sacrificed. That might be considered kindness because they're not wholly in control of their senses. They don't quite know where they are. It might be that by altering their mindset, you're making, you know, might be see that

• 17:59Speaker 02

  they're making greater contact with their gods because of that altered state. They're seeing differently, hallucinating, they're seeing, so they're entering into that kind of world of the divine. But there is a sense that these are people who've been walked into the bog, they've been fed drugs and then they're killed in a very overly dramatic way. But is that a punishment? Or is that, you know, have these people gone willingly to their death? And that sounds like an odd thing to say. Why would you go willingly to that kind of violent death in that kind of exposed liminal space? But we don't know what their views about the afterlife was. I mean, if they're being sacrificed, and we think of obviously early Christian martyrs who willingly went to the most extreme kind of torture and death

• 18:43Speaker 02

  in the belief that that kind of violence led them to a glorious afterlife. It's the afterlife that they were searching for. They wanted to die in a more extreme way than Jesus had done on the cross. So I think that we got lots and lots of examples of people who willingly go to death in the belief it's a good thing.

• 19:00Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah. Bloody Mary and the, obviously the burnings, of course, in the period as well.

• 19:05Speaker 02

  Yes, exactly. So. It might well be that these individuals like Lindar Man went willing to his death in the sense that his life, giving of his life, was good for his people. In some way, he was appeasing the gods. We know, I don't know, it might have been a case of some kind of environmental collapse, a failure of a harvest, it might even be the arrival of the Romans, because he's dying at a time that the Romans are starting to possibly be investing in southern Britain. But it could be that there was no struggle, that he voluntarily gave himself up to this kind of death. We just don't know. It's lots of interesting questions and debates, but we shouldn't necessarily assume that these are criminals being punished. They

• 19:46Speaker 02

  might be willingly offering their lives in the hope that this brings a better existence to those people left behind.

• 19:53Tristan Hughes?

  It's an amazing story, though, from the surviving archaeological evidence of Lindar Man. As you've mentioned mistletoe in the stomach, I mean, that does make you think, is it a druid who organised it? Because the Romans do associate mistletoe with druids.

• 20:06Speaker 02

  They do. And Julius Caesar and others are very keen to link the mistletoe as some kind of special material that the druids create. The difficulty with the druids is lots of speculation, lots of fiction's been written about them. We know that there is a priestly class in one part of central France called the druids. Undoubtedly, there would have been priests and priestesses who were engaged in sacrifice, who were making the contact with the gods. So it could be, I don't want to say with mistletoe, oh, that definitely proves there's a druidic connection, this is somebody who might be a druid himself. We don't know. Obviously, someone knows how to kill this person, is doing it in a

• 20:49Speaker 02

  certain way, they've done it before, they're undoubtedly be doing it again. But yeah, the mistletoe there might be a way of dulling the pain, or introducing some kind of mind-altering substance that makes the death less painful to the individual involved.

• 21:06Tristan Hughes?

  So, Mo, I've got a couple of others on my list before we get to your work at the Do It Trigger. The biggest name that I recognise here, and I think is he on display at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin, Old Croghan Man.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  Yes, one of those things about human, I mean, there's another aspect about the human burials is the display element, is that there is a feeling that, you know, should we be putting these figures on display? I have to say that they are probably the most exciting things for people to sit. Not everyone's going to be affected the same way, and I think you do need some kind of trigger alert if you are showing human remains. But you're right, with Croghan Man, we've got an individual there, he's missing the head and lower part of his torso, because again, the way that he was recovered through peat digging. But it is another individual that seems to have suffered torture prior to death.

• 21:55Tristan Hughes?

  And what do we know about this torture? Do we think it could be evidence of sacrifice?

• 21:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think with Old Croghan Man, indeed a lot of the other burials from central Ireland, is that these are individuals who have been sacrificed. I mean, Croghan Man seems to have had his nipples removed as another element perhaps of torture prior to death. So they're instigating pain. Now, is that because he is a criminal and you're trying to make him suffer before he's executed? Or is it all part of this process of introducing different aspects which aren't necessarily fatal, but ultimately contribute to the ultimate demise?

• 22:33Tristan Hughes?

  I think this is also the thing, isn't it, that because we've got some examples that might suggest human sacrifice for some of these bog bodies, we can't then just say that every body you find in the bog is a result of a ritualistic killing, which may well be human sacrifice. Many other times, actually, sometimes, remember talking to Melanie about this, they might have just fallen in the bog and not got out.

• 22:54Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, bogs are dangerous places. So we could have a number of individuals who've just fallen in and have drowned and have been lost. And there's no way you can recover that body. So, and it comes later with doing peat digging. But I think a lot of the examples that we're finding archaeologically, because they show evidence of trauma on the body. I mean, things like with Old Croghan Man, with his nipples being removed with a knife, you wouldn't find that if you were just dealing with a skeleton, you know, you'd be looking for trauma on the bone. So finding the flesh, finding the skin of these individuals, you can see if they've been tortured, if they've had, been forcibly shaved, if they've had ears cut off, all these sort of elements, we can see if you've got the body preserved as they are within the bog context.

• 23:38Tristan Hughes?

  I'll just read out the other two I have on my list, because I want to get on. But just because they're highlighted as well, we've always got Galach Man, between 400 and 200 B.C., probably strangled, with he was found around his neck, maybe a garrot. This interesting, two wooden pegs pinned him down, which is quite something.

• 23:57Speaker 02

  There is that sort of sense that when garrotting, strangulation does seem to be, I mean, that makes, I think, the death last longer.

• 24:04Tristan Hughes?

  But less blood in that case.

• 24:05Speaker 02

  There is less blood in that. But if you're, yeah, I mean, that particular example, there doesn't seem to have been a throat cut. But it's the cutting of the throat and the strangulation that seems to be a fairly common feature, certainly in the Denmark burials.

• 24:17Tristan Hughes?

  And this last one, this is of a woman, Ballymacum's Moor, woman, from about 343 B.C. to 1 A.D. C.E., around that time. Her remains, she was decapitated at the bog, and her head was taken away. But that almost sounds like, once again, she was led into the bog alive, and then it happened there. But in that case, maybe different traditions, and so we don't know the context around it. But then, her head is taken away and the rest is kept in the bog.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  The removal of the head, I mean, that's an interesting story in its own way, because you see a lot of, in early medieval Christianity, certainly in Wales, there's lots of martyrs and saints who have their heads removed, and that's the origin of a sacred spring. So it might be going back to that idea of head hunting. We know, again, from Roman writers, that the taking of the head, that sense of a person's identity as a kind of, as a prestigious object, is relatively common. So it could be there, it's less of a sense of a sacrifice. Again, we don't know whether this is a punishment, but the head being retained and taken somewhere else. But it is another good example of someone being led into the bog, knowing full well the fate that is reserved for them.

• 25:23Speaker 01

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• 27:37Tristan Hughes?

  So those are a few examples from peat bogs in Britain and Ireland. But, I mean, that's only kind of, so it's the northern part of Britain and Ireland where you have the peat bogs, it's less so in southern Britain. But there is still potential evidence of human sacrifice and remains discovered in southern Britain as well. And these are from both hillforts and everyday settlements, do you think?

• 28:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it does get very difficult when you're dealing, certainly with areas where you don't normally get a huge numbers of skeletal evidence. But you can often tell when you're getting the actual bones, whether an individual has suffered a particular trauma, usually to the skull, you can see there's a definite blow there, or to the shoulders, to the arms, whether these are defensive injuries, someone's faced their attacker, or whether these are somebody who has been executed. And then the actual subsequent treatment. So somewhere like Danbury, and there's a number of hillforts across the central southern Britain, there are pits with heads in, sometimes with still the jaw and a few vertebrae suggesting forcible, you know, actual decapitation, as a cause

• 28:41Speaker 02

  of death, rather than the head being removed in a post-mortem sense and curated later. You get individuals who've died violently, who've been thrown in a pit. You sometimes get evidence of sword or spear blows to the head. It does get difficult to be sure in those kind of circumstances whether you are looking at individuals who've died fighting. This might be an honoured ancestor or someone who died an heroic death, facing an enemy combatant, and therefore has been treated with ceremonial burial, rather than somebody who's been dragged there and then sacrificed and then killed. So a lot of the times, we can say this person has died with violence, but we can't say what the cause of that violence

• 29:23Speaker 02

  is. With the bog, we can say they've been taken a long way from the area of settlement, and then they've been done to death. So this is a premeditated theatrical execution. But if you're dealing with a skeleton in a grave in a hillfort... And they've died violently, it's difficult to know whether that is, they die in the circumstances of normal life, or whether they've been executed or sacrificed or whatever. So usually it's the kind of context that that body is found in, if that's unusual, that in turn might suggest it is a.

• 29:52Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I was going to ask, what's the context of these skeletons discovered at Danbury Hillfort? So should we be imagining, were they found within the confines of the ramparts? Or were they found outside the hillfort? Give us a sense of that.

• 30:04Speaker 02

  So a lot of the burial remains there are found in what appears to be disused storage pits. So if we think of a big cylindrical pit cut down into the chalk, which may have been used as a grain silo, it may have been used as a cold storage for food. When that's gone out of use, what you often find is that animal remains, so sacrificed animals, animal body parts have been thrown into the pit. And in some cases, we get skulls with cranial trauma. Sometimes you get bits of jaws, sometimes you get complete individuals that are thrown in. And it's that sense of, this is not a formal burial, as we'd understand it, if somebody laid sort of lovingly within a grave with grave goods. There's a feeling

• 30:45Speaker 02

  that the actual throwing into the pit or the dismemberment of the body that suggests this is an execution or this is a sacrifice. It's not a grieving family looking after the remains or sending the remains of a loved one off into the afterlife. This is the disposal of somebody in a very dramatic and violent way.

• 31:03Tristan Hughes?

  And are there any particular examples from Danbury that people have thought this is more likely than any others to be potentially a result of human sacrifice?

• 31:11Speaker 02

  I mean, there are. I mean, the problem is there's no single pattern to everything. So you get some pits where you've got a selection of skulls in. Sometimes you get individuals who've been, as I say, sort of sharing a grave or sharing a pit and it looks like they've been thrown in. So are these people who are captured enemies who've been executed, are they people who have died defending the site? Are they criminals? There are, you know, there's lots of different speculation, but we can say that violence and the treatment of the body afterwards suggests that this is not a normal burial, that these are not honoured, respected ancestors, that they've died for a particular reason, and then they've been disposed or perhaps in a storage pit rather than in a grave, because it's a sacrifice to the gods.

• 31:56Tristan Hughes?

  I think that's all we can say, isn't it?

• 31:57Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 31:58Tristan Hughes?

  That's all we can say. But let's go on to a site where you have done a lot, a lot of work. And we can focus on a few particular discoveries made and the evidence supporting that these figures were sacrificed. So let us introduce the site of Duropolis. Now, Miles, would you care to take it away?

• 32:19Speaker 02

  I, sometimes I regret using the term.

• 32:22Tristan Hughes?

  We've got five minutes for this, by the way.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  It condensed seventeen minutes, five minutes. It's a big Iron Age, late Iron Age settlement with some sort of evidence of Roman activity coming in as well, which we've been investigating at Winterbourne, Kingston in Dorset. It's part of the Duotrigas project, looking at the way in which the late Iron Age tribe of the Duotrigas, do they become Roman? What actually happens when the Romans arrive? So we've had roundhouses, we've had storage pits, we've had cemeteries, a whole range of evidence coming up. I mean, the key interest that we've had is the cemeteries, because these are people who are burying their dead in a particular way with grave goods. And so we're getting quite a nice percentage of the population. We can study things like age at death, disease, health,

• 33:06Speaker 02

  what they're eating and so on. However, within that context, we've also found at least five individuals who aren't buried in that very safe, respectable, usual way, as if they're being placed in the ground for their journey to the afterlife. These are people who are found at the bottom of storage pits, usually faced down as if they've been thrown in. And it's these individuals who we are suspecting are human sacrifices.

• 33:32Tristan Hughes?

  And before we delve into that, I mean, explain just how special it is to have a cemetery surviving with multiple human burials surviving from late Iron Age Britain.

• 33:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it sounds odd to say, you assume there's cemeteries all over the country. But within Iron Age Britain, it is actually relatively rare to get a large cemetery whereby you're getting men and women and children buried. In Dorset, in Eastern Yorkshire, there are cultural groups who, for whatever reason, decide that they are going to dispose their dead in individual graves in larger cemeteries. The rest of the country, they might be cremating their dead, they're doing something unusual with human remains, and we don't get the skeletal evidence. So we're very, very restricted in those sort of areas where we can actually study the human population. And Dorset is

• 34:24Speaker 02

  one such zone. So we've, over the last seventeen years, we've excavated at least six cemeteries of late Iron Age date, in which men and women in equal numbers are being buried. And they've got grave goods, they've got joints of meat, they've got pots containing drinks. So that we don't know much about the gods that they worship, but there's a clear sense, there's life after death. And they're being given the necessary prerequisites for that journey, their food and drink to sustain them on that journey to another world. So that's great. But that really relates to, I guess, to the elite, the wealthy, the well-off, the generally successful farmers. But finding individuals facedown in storage pits tells us a completely

• 35:07Speaker 02

  different aspect to that lifestyle.

• 35:10Tristan Hughes?

  That's really interesting. And how many do you say potentially?

• 35:12Speaker 02

  So we've got five individuals. Four look like they've been thrown in, so arms and legs are all disjointed as they've been faced down. One is faced down, but appears to be, the legs are drawn up under the body, they might have been bound up and then thrown in. But four definite, five possible.

• 35:28Tristan Hughes?

  Shall we go through them one by one and kind of explore what we know from the archaeology? The first one I've got is the Winterbourne woman.

• 35:35Speaker 02

  Yes. I mean, that's the one we've managed to publish. That's what we found in 2010. So it's one of the first storage pit burials that we recovered. And to that date, we'd had one cemetery with all these sort of individuals buried carefully and respectfully with grave goods. This was a storage pit. Now, every one of the storage pits that we find, we excavate because pretty much everyone has got some kind of placed deposit. There's this feeling, I guess, that in the Iron Age, you dig a pit, you put your foodstuffs in it. The next agricultural cycle, that pit gets abandoned, but you put an offering. Sometimes that offering.

• 36:09Tristan Hughes?

  Throw someone in there.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Well, not every time. I think as a way of getting through your population quite quickly if you did that. But sometimes it's an inverted pot. Sometimes it's a dog burial. We've got a few of those. Sometimes we get bits of animals which are cut up. So we get bits of horse, bits of cow in the bottom of the pit. So there's a feeling that animals are being sacrificed and they're not being eaten, but the meat's being consigned to the bottom of the pit as an offering. But in 2010, we found, going down into one of these pits, there was an adult female, she was lying facedown. So completely unlike the other graves that we'd had, which are in crouched or fetal positions, lying on one side with their legs drawn up in a shallow grave. She was facedown as if she'd been thrown into

• 36:51Speaker 02

  the pit. And she was lying on what we thought at the time was a bed of meat. It was sort of like a mass of horse, cow, pig bones, very weathered bones. So these weren't freshly killed animals. This was bone relating to animals that had been killed some time ago. The bone was very weathered. Creating a platform at the bottom, and she was lying facedown on top of that. So straight away, we knew that was odd. We hadn't found anything like that before. And there's something deeply suspicious about the nature of that deposit, the nature of those remains. It wasn't until we excavated and removed her, did we see, looking at the remains, that there was a series of injuries on the body. One, a very

• 37:33Speaker 02

  violent break across her ribs. So just before, a couple of weeks before she died, she'd had a significant blow to the chest, which had cracked one rib, which was starting to heal, and had bruised other ones. She had an injury to the head, but most critically of all, she had a massive cut to one of the neck vertebra. So, and what it actually looked like is, the only way that could have happened, if someone was holding her from behind and had run a sort of a blade, a deep incision across the neck, and effectively cut her arteries in the neck. So just like with the bog bodies, here, or somebody had their throat cut, we can't obviously tell whether she had a ligature applied, as we lend our man to make a more theatrical blood spurting.

• 38:17Tristan Hughes?

  There was three or four kind of levels to the killing, almost, right?

• 38:20Speaker 02

  But here is someone, and what the intriguing thing is, because having had that throat cut, which would have introduced a lot of blood into the pit, she's then thrown face first onto this white platform of bone, of animals that had long since died. So it might be a sense of the transfer of the life essence of the human into the animal bone, or her life essence as a soul, the blood draining out into the ground. If you believe your gods are in the ground, and they control the fertility of your crops, then the giving of a life in that very public and theatrical way into the bottom of the pit is probably the best way, from that perspective, of appeasing your gods.

• 38:59Tristan Hughes?

  God, so it could be an agriculturally linked kind of ritual ceremony.

• 39:02Speaker 02

  It could be. I mean, we don't know enough about the actual time that she was killed, but it could be if there is crop failure, or there's some kind of, I don't know, catastrophe with food procurement, you think the gods are angry, you give the life of a human. It's an extreme sacrifice. We know they're sacrificing animals all the time. You know, we're getting pits and pretty much every single cut that we excavate has got animal body parts in. So they're killing animals to eat, but they're also giving offerings to the ground all the time. But every so often, presumably, something extreme is needed to keep the gods on board. And I think this is an instance of that.

• 39:37Tristan Hughes?

  And do we have any idea, has there been studies of the bones themselves to find out more about who this woman was?

• 39:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, in the sense, we've done lots of DNA analysis of all the cemeteries, all the burials we've got. This individual is not connected to any of the other burials that we've got. She's not family, as far as that's set. I mean, she might be connected to somebody in a nearby farmstead, but they don't appear to be killing one of their own. Looking at the sort of mobility isotopes, looking at the whole range of stuff, evidence in the teeth and so on, it looks like she didn't grow up on the chalk. We're digging primarily on the chalk. So she's not connected to the family that lived there. She's probably not growing up in a geological environment that's close to the settlement. So effectively, I think she's an outsider. And it's not making it better, but I think she could be a captive, she could be a prisoner.

• 40:28Speaker 02

  She's certainly very maltreated, you know, she's quite malnourished. She's got a series of injuries, as I said, the most recent one being the the rib damage before she's then killed at the pit. So she's somebody might be the lower end of the socio economic scale. She might in some way be thought to be more disposable, which is a terrible thing to say about anyone. But within the community, they might have felt if we were going to sacrifice somebody, she's the one we're going to sacrifice. She's also got, when we look at her vertebra, they're very, very compressed. So she's carrying lots of heavy weights through a lot of her life. So I think all these things together suggest that she's probably a slave. She might well be a prisoner of war, but for whatever reason, at whatever time, they've decided

• 41:11Speaker 02

  we are going to kill someone, make a human off our sacrifice, she's the one to to kill.

• 41:16Tristan Hughes?

  I guess it's also very interesting when you explore the wider context of new research that has come out from your site in the past year or so. I remember going down there last year, we did a documentary on this very topic. The fact that it seems that the men are moving in to the settlements, they're moving in with their wives. And it seems that they're matrile local societies in which it's easier for women to, well, lands being passed down their side of the family. So I guess to say it's horrific as it is to say, it makes sense that they're not sacrificing one of their own women. Because that's that they're one of the landowners of the society, they hold quite a bit of power. So they're not one of the ones being sacrificed and then thrown in the pit.

• 41:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, no, exactly, exactly. I mean, it obviously the study's still in its early days, but it does, as you say, with Laura Cassidy and our colleagues at Dublin University looking at the DNA. It does look as if we've got individuals, certainly women, who are staying on the land. The multiple generations of of women being born, grown up and died and being buried there. The men seem to be further distant and less connected to the women. The women have more grave goods with them. So there is a real sense of it being a matrifocal, a matrilineal society, land ownership, perhaps passing down the female line. And a lot of the times you look at the round houses that are living in, you look at the settlements they've got, you look at the landscape, you think this is some kind of utopia. This is some, it's a fantastic lifestyle.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  We recognize a lot of their hopes and dreams and the kind. And then you you see something like this human sacrifice, you think, actually, no, they're very different. There are certain aspects of their life, their attitude to life, their outlook on on existence that is totally different for us. And they think it's perfectly acceptable in certain conditions to kill somebody and throw them in the pit. And that's fine. But as you say, she's not one of them. So I don't know whether that's good or not. They're not killing their own, but they certainly deem it perfectly acceptable to kill someone who's considered to be an outsider.

• 43:11Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, I don't think we need to see whether it's good or not.

• 43:13Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 43:13Tristan Hughes?

  Question, you shouldn't. But but I think it's interesting to theorize in that society, whether one of those women, landowners, you know, had power, could have also been a spiritual leader, you know, a druid, as we know, it was men and women, who could have then been overseeing this ritual, this ceremony, that might be an example of sacrifice in that case.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Exactly. I mean, it's one of those things, certainly with the bog bodies, we never know whether the individuals who are buried, are they one of the communities being killed or is it a prisoner of war, some distant? With these skeletons, we can say that this is somebody who's not part of that community. But who's doing the killing?

• 43:46Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 43:47Speaker 02

  Whether it's it's part of the, you know, the women who are in control there, who's killing somebody, perhaps not to pollute their own kind of genetic makeup, we don't know. But it's a very, and people have said, well, can you say it's a sacrifice? It's definitely an execution. But I think the fact that this is someone who has been killed in this obviously theatrical, over the top way. But there's a lot of thought has gone into actually creating that bone platform. When you look at the bones she was thrown down on top of, it's not a random scatter. They've at one end of the pit, they've got the sort of the skulls of horse and cow. Then you've got the vertebra and ribs and pelvis. There's some kind of order that's been created. So there's a lot of thought has been gone to how we're going to create

• 44:31Speaker 02

  the theatre within which this individual will be killed. So in that sense, I think it's probably one of the best examples we've got out of a wetland context of of obvious human sacrifice.

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• 46:19Tristan Hughes?

  And are the other four potential examples of human sacrifice at Diopolis at the site? Are they very similar in how they're laid out in the burials?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  They are in the sense of being thrown into the pit. We had one, three years ago now, an adult male, who very clearly had been thrown in because one of his legs was up against the side wall of the pit and the foot was at the top.

• 46:40Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  And he was lying with his arms as, you know, you could imagine they almost see where he'd been killed and where he'd been thrown into.

• 46:48Tristan Hughes?

  So you would have found the foot first when you were digging down on those.

• 46:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. So they found the upper levels of the feet and they had to work down and and to find him. And so, I mean, that's one of those other things that sort of brings you up short because as archaeologists, we're finding skeletons all the time. But these are people who've died somewhere, have just been taken somewhere else and have been buried. And you should get a sense of of care and decency. Here, we're actually dealing with a murder victim. And we can identify the place where they were murdered. You can see they were obviously killed here at the top of the pit and thrown in. And that does bring a whole new perspective and it does make you feel quite, quite, you know, you're dealing with a crime scene effectively. You're never going to work out who the perpetrator was, but you can see the victim and you can see how they were killed and you can see where they were killed.

• 47:35Tristan Hughes?

  Gosh.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  But that particular man, he was thrown in. There were a few animal bones underneath him, but nothing like the platform. The other, the first lady, there was no obvious trauma that we could see on the skeleton. But the fact that he was lying face down suggested that violent death. And to be honest, again, it's a lot of the bog bodies, the way they've had their throats cut and they've been strangled. It doesn't leave an impact on the bone. So there's plenty of ways he could have been killed without it then impacting on his skeleton.

• 48:07Tristan Hughes?

  And that's in contrast to the the bog bodies where you have that skin surviving. So you can see the evidence of the garrotting and stuff.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, if he'd been garrotted, and you said with the with the bog bodies, often they're found with the noose still with them.

• 48:19Tristan Hughes?

  Tolland's man, isn't it?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yes, is another good example. If he'd been strangled, that would have decayed in in the chalky, dry soils as well. So we wouldn't have the evidence. But it's the fact that the it's the nature of that throwing into the pit that's very disrespectful, given that everyone else is buried in in nice shallow graves with grave goods and there's an order to it. The fact that he's thrown in suggests a disregard for the individual. And I suspect that he probably died on on the surface. And we had one last year, again, this was an adult female who also was thrown in and the body was, the limbs are tangled. So I think she is another good example of a of a sacrifice.

• 48:55Tristan Hughes?

  But interesting that of those five, it is men and women clearly. It's almost like there's no kind of gender focus on the these.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it doesn't seem to be, neither does it seem to be an age focus. I mean, what we're we're doing at the moment, obviously, the one we had in 2010 was quite early on in our studies. The other four that we've recovered, we're also now doing the DNA and the analysis of those to see, again, are these outsiders? Are they connected to each other? Is there anything we can say about their lives? Because all of our lives are dietary choices and injuries are written in our bone. We might, for the first time, be able to to bring up a sort of a biography of the sacrificed. Now, what is it distinctive about these individuals and their lifestyles that made them different? Are they undergoing a harsher lifestyle, a different kind of diet to those who are in control? This is something we can do for the first time.

• 49:45Tristan Hughes?

  And that's research you're doing at the moment and hoping to reveal soon the results of it.

• 49:50Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:50Tristan Hughes?

  Right. You're teasing us, basically, how to get you back on for a future one. But yes, I guess we'll now, well, actually, one more question before the big why part.

• 50:02Tristan Hughes?

  Does it seem like, I know because the organic material doesn't survive in those burials, but as you say, it's a crime scene, it seems to be almost, you know where they're killed, you know where they're thrown into the pit. Should we also be imagining that their hands are tied behind their back almost?

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, the um, the first burial that we had had her arms underneath her and they were crossed, the wrists were touching, so I suspect her hands were tied. The second one I described had his arms in front as if he'd been thrown in, um, and perhaps was still alive and his arms had gone off in it defensively to protect him in the fall, but the other ones had all their hands behind them, um, and again they are crossed, so they were tied. And I think that also suggests an element of being fought, you know, being killed, I'd be going to an unwilling death. So these aren't people who have been drugged potentially with the bog bodies and know what's in store for them and are going perhaps to their death willingly, even though it's violent.

• 51:00Speaker 02

  These individuals do seem to be bound at the point of death, so there's less likely that they are happily willingly going towards this fate.

• 51:08Tristan Hughes?

  But this is, that's a great example to point there because it shows that for all the times we've compared the examples like Lindellmann and the Winterborne woman, you need to be careful at the same time because there are clear differences, the actual, how far we can compare the two environments when exploring human sacrifice in Britain?

• 51:29Speaker 02

  Yes, I mean, all we can say is that these are individuals who have died with violence, they are sacrifices, but the context is very, very different. So I think in the, with the bogs, because it feels like it's such a liminal space that the gods are physically residing there, they're being walked there and then killed, whereas in the hillforts and the banjo enclosures and all the other sort of sites we've been looking at on the chalkland, these might be killed within the settlement zone. So there's a very different element to the deaths, even though we can say that, you know, they are being killed for whatever reason, to appease the gods.

• 52:03Tristan Hughes?

  So Mars, we've covered all these different potential examples of human sacrifice in bogs, hillforts, in everyday settlements. I want to ask again in kind of this more focused question of why, what are the theories behind why people in late Iron Age Britain would want to sacrifice people?

• 52:22Speaker 02

  I mean, the difficulty is, of course, they didn't write anything down, so we can't see into their minds as to what is going on here. And we have to rely to some extent on Roman writers, that Julius Caesar, when he's describing the executions of criminals, he talks about people who are being put to death for various immoral aspects, you know, judging by Julius Caesar, it seems bizarre because everything he does is pretty immoral, um, but it, you know, he doesn't give us, none of the Roman writers give us any reason as to why they felt these people were being killed. Uh, but they do sort of imply there is a criminal aspect to it. It's not the taking of a leader or a priest or someone important, it is the lower classes

• 53:06Speaker 02

  or someone who's, who's gone against the wider community. So, I mean, it could be that is an element of it because the Romans were very good with making death a public event as a warning to others. So even people dying in the arena, it was done for entertainment, but it was also from the point of view of saying, these people have transgressed the law or they fought against Rome, this is the punishment. If you step out of line, this will happen to you. And crucifixion is part of that. I mean, it's essentially a mode of death that's reserved for slaves or people who had some kind of uprising, but it's, it's, you're nailing somebody to a cross and they die and their bodies are left there. So it's like the gibbet in medieval Britain, it's a sense of this body is a continual

• 53:49Speaker 02

  warning to not step out of line. It could be that a lot of the Iron Age burials that we see, certainly the ones in the pits, if they've got their throats cut, if it's done in a theatrical way in front of an audience, it could be this is a warning, this person has broken the law, has done something bad, we're killing, everyone has to watch it, and there's a sense of if you step out of line, this will be you.

• 54:11Tristan Hughes?

  But then is that sacrifice? Or is that more just, that's just the punishment?

• 54:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, it's sacrifice in the sense that it's, it's a theatrical killing in a pre-measured way, that they're actually doing it and the creation of a, of a, of a platform. There is a, what stage does an execution become a sacrifice? If you're doing it to appease the gods, if you're killing somebody as a punishment, but also to keep the gods happy, then it is a, is a sacrifice. I think it's, it's the, it's the theatrical element, it's the overkill element that makes something a sacrifice, rather than necessarily a punishment execution, but it is a very thin line between the two. And certainly the Romans were very clear cut that all the people they killed, it was for punishment rather than as a way of making the gods happy.

• 54:58Tristan Hughes?

  What about the context in which they are killed? Because from what you've been saying, it seems as if a bog is a more prestigious place to be executed, to be sacrificed than thrown in, quite frankly, thrown in headfirst in a storage pit.

• 55:12Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I mean, I guess if you think your gods reside in the bog, if the bog is a living space, then perhaps, I don't know, would anyone be happily go to their death in that way? But if you feel that the gods inhabit that space, then you are going immediately to join them.

• 55:29Tristan Hughes?

  Yes.

• 55:30Speaker 02

  So however severe the mode of death, it's going to be painful, but it'll be relatively quick. If you're drugged with ergot or mistletoe, then perhaps elements of that pain will be minimised, but you're being placed in an environment where the gods reside, so you're joining them instantly. So there might be that sense that you are, much like the, you know, we said earlier about the Christian martyrs, who feel that the manner of their death makes them go instantly into their afterlife. You don't, yes, you might be worried about the pain element, but once that's done, you've proved yourself and, you know, your afterlife is secure.

• 56:04Tristan Hughes?

  Whereas with a storage pit, you're being thrown in with the remains of animals, decaying animals, right? Which feels less.

• 56:11Speaker 02

  That does seem less respectful. I mean, it seems bizarre to have respectful ways of killing somebody, but there is a sense of, of the, yeah, the, the ultimate disposal, you are in a, a storage pit. And yes, okay, it's going down into the ground where the gods may inhabit, but generally speaking, those pits are filled with rubbish. So there, there, there is a sense within the bog, you're being claimed by the divine, whereas in the pit, you're just being thrown in with the rubbish. So there might be a sense that that is a far less respectful, which again might possibly tie into the fact that these individuals had their wrists bound because they did not want to go happily into that world.

• 56:47Tristan Hughes?

  Yes, compared, compared to the ones we have in the bog bodies, where to our knowledge, there's no evidence of wrists being bound.

• 56:54Speaker 02

  Not as far as I'm aware of, no. So there is a sense that, and it might be that they were so drugged up, they didn't realise what was happening to them, but it could easily be that, yeah, they were, there's that feeling that you are joining your deities straight, you've got that instant link with the afterlife, with the, with the other world, which you don't have in the chalkland storage pits.

• 57:12Tristan Hughes?

  And we've talked about bogs and hillforts and settlements. I guess this is theory as well, if we don't have the evidence of it, but could we imagine similar activities happening on the sides of rivers or on the coastline, but that evidence just doesn't survive?

• 57:26Speaker 02

  No, it doesn't. I mean, that's the trouble, once the body's been inserted into a river, it will break down. Uh, there's been quite a lot of skulls brought out from the Thames and from the Wallbrook, um, which may be from bodies that have been buried but have been disturbed by the water, but it's, it's quite possible that what we're looking at are individuals who've been killed and have been thrown into that watery space. So their shields, swords, spears, which thrown in will get recovered and we'll go, well, this is a votive ritual object, clearly, but human remains, bodies thrown in will break down and will very unlikely to be recovered. So there could be a large numbers of people, more than in the bogs, who are being killed and have been placed directly in the river and therefore have been seen to be claimed by the river gods, um, but we will never recover them archaeologically.

• 58:11Tristan Hughes?

  No, so that's the frustration that we've already highlighted with the surviving evidence we have. And overarching, can we see any emerging pattern as to the types of figures that seem to have been like, it seems plausible that they were sacrificed, whether it was in a place like Duopolis or in a peat bog?

• 58:34Speaker 02

  I mean, as far as we can see in the peat bogs, the bodies, because they're far well better preserved, there is a sense that these, to some extent, are individuals who aren't engaged in hard labour. So with Lindellmann and with some of the Irish examples, as it being explained, they got really nice, looked after fingernails, they doesn't appear to have done any kind of hard labour, their hands are uncalloused. So it could be what we're seeing there are the sense of a priestly elite or perhaps a ruling elite. There's been a suggestion that in some of the Irish ones, these might be kings, it might be the idea of when you come to the end of your rule, you are sacrificed for the greater good.

• 59:12Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 59:13Speaker 02

  Whereas the individuals that we've been looking at from the storage pits in, in the, in Dorset, seem to be at the lower end of the scale, these are people who are engaged in hard labour, who are considered to be more disposable. So the sacrifice there, it might just be the giving of a human life, and it's better from their perspective to kill someone who is of less significance, whereas in the bogs, we're seeing people who are great significance, who are being consigned to the bog. So it might be different levels of society, different forms of death, different forms of sacrifice.

• 59:45Tristan Hughes?

  That's an interesting theory, I mean, with the people in the bogs, whether they are, you know, reach an old age and they're almost kind of passing the torch on to the next generation and rather than living out their days, they have this end? I mean, do we have any idea whether many of these peat bog burials, they're old, older people?

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  They, well, they seem, I mean, define old in the Iron Age, I mean, they seem to be within that sort of age of late twenties to perhaps early forties.

• 1:00:09Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, I wasn't thinking that, but okay, yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  But given the life expectancy of the time, that might be considered quite good. You, you, you are sort of, you're, you're sort of cutting the rose in full bloom rather than letting somebody degenerate into later life. So there might be a sense of, of you're in your prime, that's the good time to go, rather than wait for, for later period. But whether, I mean, it has been a suggestion that these are perhaps members of, of Iron Age royalty, and that's part of the deal, you rule, but in the knowledge that you are later going to join the gods in that violent, dramatic way. So you can't have one sense without the other, you can't have the power without. The sign off at the end.

• 1:00:50Tristan Hughes?

  Miles, it's been so fascinating. I think I'm running out of questions to ask because we've covered quite a lot. I think I'm going to leave it with one last thing I have in front of me, which is a couple of views on human sacrifice from Roman authors, not actually in Britain, but it'd be good to get your thoughts on this as well as whether we can apply it to the British context. So this is first of all, an extract from Julius Caesar talking about the Gauls, an extract from his The Gallic Wars in the mid first century B.C. And he says, "The Gauls believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods. But when the supply of such fails, they resort to the execution of the innocent." So that's

• 1:01:31Tristan Hughes?

  an interesting one first. And the second one is from Tacitus in his Germania. So they're talking about in Germany. It says, "Punishments vary in Germany according to the nature of the crime. Traitors and deserters are hung upon trees. Cowards, dastards, and those guilty of unnatural practices are suffocated in mud under a wicker fence. This difference of punishment has in view the principle that villainage should be exposed while it is punished, but turpitude concealed."

• 1:02:00Speaker 02

  The difficulty, as all things with individuals like Caesar, is that he's not like in the modern anthropologists.

• 1:02:07Tristan Hughes?

  He's the first one. He's the first extract.

• 1:02:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. With all those accounts, in the sense of all Roman writers, they're not modern anthropologists sort of living with a community, understanding them, trying to understand their practices. So I think there's a lot of things like that, the face down in the bogs, that kind of stuff. These are actual accounts of things that have happened, but the reasons for which they are happening aren't necessarily the right ones. So I think the punishment idea, that is certainly something that we, you know, is eminently plausible, but we don't know how much of a Roman spin has been added to that, to try and explain it. Because Caesar and other writers like Tacitus and so on, they're not overly concerned with getting their facts right. They present evidence, but essentially they're writing to a Roman audience. They're entertaining that audience. They're trying to remind their

• 1:02:52Speaker 02

  Roman colleagues how barbaric and odd these people are. So the practices like we said earlier about Caesar the wicker man, or the execution of criminals and then innocents, and then placed down in the bog, they're explaining these or describing them, but they're not really giving you the full set of evidence because they weren't aware of it. They don't really care that much. But that's all we've got. So it would, you know, it would be more interesting to think if all human sacrifices at the time were punishments, but they don't always seem to be. The bog bodies are being a case in point, that we've got people there who seem to be at the upper end of society. So what are they doing that's considered worthy of punishment?

• 1:03:37Tristan Hughes?

  Big question, isn't it?

• 1:03:37Speaker 02

  But certainly, the whole thing is the giving of a life. It's not something that happens all the time. We're not dealing with industrial levels of human killing. They're very good at killing animals and giving those kind of lives. But every so often, and what the key point is, what is it in society? What is it in the natural world, the environment, that means the giving of the human life is the important thing? It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen. And we're trying to understand by looking at the skeleton and the body remains, this person involved, the person at the end of that being sacrificed, does that explain the nature of the killing itself? Why is it being done? What is the need for it? That's something we're still a long way from answering, but we're getting closer.

• 1:04:19Tristan Hughes?

  Do you think we ever will answer that question?

• 1:04:21Speaker 02

  I think given the more examples of sacrifice that we get, given the battery of scientific analysis that we can now do on the bodies, looking at ancestry, looking at connections, looking at dietary evidence, all these sort of things give us a better picture of the sacrificed. So the building up of that database, I think in a couple of years' time, we'll have enough, have a better idea of the kinds of people who are being killed, the ways in which they're being killed. And that might help us to understand better that aspect of our age society.

• 1:04:51Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we'll get you back on the show when that happens, my friend, to learn more about this. But in the meantime, this has been so interesting, and it just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time, Miles, to come on the show.

• 1:05:01Speaker 02

  Thank you for having me.

• 1:05:07Tristan Hughes?

  Thanks so much for joining us on The Ancients today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you are loving The Ancients, then why not become a History Hit subscriber? As a subscriber, you will have access to hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, plus early access and ad-free podcasts. You can sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. See you in the next episode.

• 1:05:37Speaker 01

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