PAST CRIMEScorpse, where the blood would not be released by such an action?); and
individuals with evidence for other perimortem trauma such as stabs to the
lower abdomen or lower back, chopping blows to the knee, fractures of the
distal upper limb, or bluntforce trauma to the cranial vault. These all seem to
be related to attempts to incapacitate or immobilise the individual prior to
decapitation, and again, this is not something that is likely to have taken place
on an individual who was already dead’. An individual from a Winchester site
shows evidence of a chopping blow to the neck that could only have been
delivered to someone still alive, who was in a kneeling position.
There are, however, other explanations for removal of the head, which
seem to have been the case with seven late Roman burials at another site in
Winchester, Lankhills. All these individuals had been decapitated with a knife
after death, and the heads placed near the legs. Two bodies had other possible
signs of violence on their bones. A further headless burial discovered at the
site was of a very small child. Clearly, the child is not likely to have been a
criminal, so was the beheading a ritual act, possibly to deter its ghost from
haunting the living? The Romans were very superstitious about ghosts, and
firmly believed in the power of the dead to rise from the grave to wreak harm
on the living. Iron Age societies in Europe are said to have believed that the
soul resided in the head, and practised decapitation after death to allow the
soul to become free. It is likely that this practice continued throughout the
period of Roman occupation among many of the local people, and the practice
even seems to have been revived in the later centuries of the Roman period.
There are other examples of what are called‘deviant’burials from Roman
Britain. There are people who were buried without due reverence, or buried
face down, or show signs of violence. In some cases, the prone (facedown)
burials may simply represent a burial rite of a minority religious sect, but in
other cases, something else seems to have been going on. Some bodies have
large blocks of stone weighing them down in the grave, and others have been
buried tied up. In Colchester, two prone male burials were found just outside
the formal limits of the cemetery–each had their wrists tied together. At
Bratton in Wiltshire in 1955, excavators found a prone burial with arms bent
back behind the torso, probably indicating that they had been tied. A man
buried face down in Dorchester had been mutilated at the time of death, his
right forearm and hand having been cut off. A woman buried in the prone
position in the Eastern Cemetery in London had her arms tied behind her
back, and two others had blocks of stone weighing them down. Three per cent
of the burials found at this site were prone burials, which might suggest that
there was a place of execution nearby.^6