Bournemouth University
The Celtic teenager was buried face down in a grave in Dorset, England.
While filming a television series by comedian Sandi Toksvig, a team of archaeologists found three unusual graves of Celtic women, one of whom was a teenager, who may have been sacrificed.
A team of archaeologists from Bournemouth University discovered the 2,000-year-old skeleton of a teenager face down in a grave—an unusual burial position that may be a clue in the mystery of a probable murder.
The team of researchers was excavating a Celtic archaeological site in Dorset, southwest England, earlier this year when they came across the the beard grave.
According to one from Bournemouth University, the discovery happened during the filming of ““, a new Channel 4 documentary presented by the broadcaster and comedian Sandi Toksvig.
A teenager had no grave goods and was found face down at the bottom of a grave. “This has every aspect of being a body thrown into a gravewith his hands potentially tied at the wrists in front of his body”, explains the leader of the team of archaeologists, Miles Russell.
“We think it’s a ‘she’although we have not yet had the opportunity to evaluate the DNA to definitively confirm it”, adds the researcher.
Combined with the evidence that his hands were tied, these clues suggest that he was sacrificed by the Durotriges tribea Celtic group that lived in Britain during the Iron Age, before the Roman invasion, says Russell.
A teenager is not the only one likely victim of murder there.
“The other two bodies face down in graves that we recovered at the site were another teenage girl, found in 2024, and that of a young adult woman, found in 2010, whose neck had been cut“, details the archaeologist.
These unusual graves were recovered as part of Bournemouth University’s , which focuses on pre-Roman settlements in southern Britain.
The cemetery appears to date from approximately the early to mid-1st century BCabout a century before the Romans successfully invaded southern England.
Given the Celtic emphasis on maternal relationshipsit is surprising that all three unusual graves are of sacrificed women and girls.
According to Russell, they may have been in the lower end of the social scale and have been considered more “disposable”especially if they were not from the region or were not related to the ruling families.
Although the sacrificed woman discovered in 2010 has already been analyzed, the sacrificed teenager found in 2024 and the teenager found this year have not yet been fully studied.
The discovery of multiple female sacrifices suggests that the practice was very more common than previously thoughtsays Russell. “But we are lost as to the socio-political-environmental factors that triggered the practice.”
