(including homosexuality) were accorded a more ignominious death–they
were to be thrown into bogs where their moral pollution would be
concealed from sight. Are we therefore looking at actual criminals,
executed for their crimes?
Some Pictish carvings from Iron Age Scotland are thought to represent
ritual murder or sacrifice. Another Iron Age victim has been discovered at
Minehowe, on Orkney, but this man does not seem to have been a sacrificial
victim. Archaeologists came upon the body of a man aged between twenty
five and thirtyfive, buried in a shallow grave in a midden heap. The corpse
had been unceremoniously crammed into a space too small for his whole
body, around 2,000 years ago. His feet had been bent at odd angles to force
them into the available space. Large stones had been laid across the body.
Analyses at Bradford University determined that he had been around 5ft 5in
tall, and had probably been righthanded, with strong upper arms and damage
to his spine consistent with time spent lifting heavy weights. He had bad
teeth. There was a diamondshaped puncture wound on his left shoulder
caused by a powerful blow, possibly made by an arrow or a spear. On the left
side of his body there were a number of cut marks made by a sharp metal
blade. They were deep and probably fatal, penetrating his chest, lung and
kidney, as well as doing damage to his arm and hand.
That the damage was mostly on the left side of the body suggests that he
might have been holding a weapon himself, in his right hand, but lacked a
shield. His ability to defend himself had been severely comprised by the injury
to his back, which seems to have been the first wound. It was not possible to
be sure whether he had sustained any blows to the head, as the skull was too
damaged for an assessment to be made.^12
A famous murder victim
The most famous ancient murder victim found in recent years is certainly
‘Őtzi’, the frozen body found in the Alps on the border between Austria and
Italy, in 1991. The body had been preserved in glacier ice for more than 5,000
years. More recent bodies have sometimes been discovered in glaciers, but the
artefacts found withŐtzi quickly proved that he was far older. He comes from
a period (the Neolithic) when only tools of bone, antler, wood or stone were
used, and he carried a flint knife and a yew bow–but he also had a copper axe.
This discovery meant that archaeologists had to reassess their dates for the end
of the stone ages and the beginning of the Chalcolithic, or Copper Age. Clearly,
knowledge of how to smelt and cast metal had begun several hundred years
earlier than anyone had imagined.
THE OLDEST CRIMES