marching camp that was being cleared before the soldiers moved onwards in
their campaign. There were also fragments of military equipment and pottery
in the ditch. The indications are that the girl, aged between sixteen and twenty,
was British. She was otherwise healthy, but was struck down while kneeling
by the wielder of the sword. The implication is that this girl, willingly or
unwillingly, was used by the soldiers while they were in the camp, and then
disposed of along with the trash when they were ready to move on, perhaps
one of many similar tragedies that occurred during the invasion.
A much younger child, whose gender could not be certainly identified, died
further north. She or he was perhaps ten years old, and was found buried in a
shallow pit in the corner of a barracks at Vindolanda, one of the Roman forts
along Hadrian’s Wall. Like the Modena burials, this would not have been a
legal way to dispose of the dead in the period, which was the midfourth
centuryAD.
Analysis of the tooth enamel showed that, until the age of seven or eight,
this child grew up in the Mediterranean–either Southern Europe or North
Africa. Was he or she a slave, or part of the family of one of the soldiers? In
theory, soldiers of earlier armies were not allowed to marry or bring their
families with them, although many local liaisons did occur, but by the middle
of the third century, these rules had been relaxed. If there were families, they
probably lived outside the fort, in thevicus, the civilian settlement outside the
gates, which provided services and entertainment for the troops and a local
market for the natives. The child’s hands appear to have been tied and the
head had been crushed, although it is not clear whether this happened at the
time of death, or was later damage caused by the weight of earth over the
burial. However, as all the other bones had survived quite well, it is possible
that the cause of death was a heavy blow that fractured the skull. The nature of
the burial suggests that the killer wanted to hide the evidence of the crime
from the authorities. Presumably it would have been hard to smuggle the dead
body out of the fort without being seen by sentries, so this clandestine burial
was undertaken. But each barrack room would have been home to eight
soldiers, who could hardly have failed to notice the smell as the child’s body
started to decompose, which suggests that there must have been a conspiracy
of silence. This certainly does suggest murder.
This is not the first evidence of murder to be found along Hadrian’s Wall, as
two bodies were found under a floor at Housesteads fort in the 1930s, one of
which had a knife blade still stuck between the ribs.17
Another cemetery in York has produced some thirty skeletons from the
Roman period, showing evidence of violent death. Some had been
CLASSICAL CRIMES