Headless Skeletons of Roman ‘Criminals’ Found During Railway Excavation in England

(CNN) — Some 40 headless skeletons unearthed by a group of archaeologists in southern England are believed to belong to “criminals” from Roman times, researchers say.

The skeletons were found when archaeologists from the program England High Speed ​​2 (HS2) they discovered a late Roman burial ground, believed to be the largest of its kind in Buckinghamshire.

A team of 50 archaeologists had been working on the site for more than a year, where they also found sections of a Roman city in the local town of Fleet Marston, along with more than 1,200 coins, dice, bells, spoons, pins and brooches.

The residential settlement was probably also used as a stopping place for soldiers and passers-by traveling through Fleet Marston, en route to the Roman city of Alchester.

The cemetery contained about 425 burials in total, the railway company said in a statement.

The number of burials, as well as the settlement itself, implies that large numbers of people came to the city in the mid to late Roman period, possibly as a result of inflated agricultural production.

One explanation for the use of decapitation as a burial practice could be that the skeletons were once “criminals or some kind of outcast”, although that process was standard during the late Roman period, the statement added.

The cemetery housed mostly entombed graves because inhumation was common at the time, but there were also some cremation burials.

“The excavation is significant both because it allows for a clear characterization of this Roman city as well as a study of many of its inhabitants,” said Richard Brown, senior project manager at COPA JV, a consortium of archaeologists working on behalf of the project.

“Together with several new Roman settlement sites discovered during the works of HS2, it enhances and populates the map of Roman Buckinghamshire,” added Brown.

Archaeologists from the HS2 excavation program have uncovered a trove of discoveries in Buckinghamshire in recent months, including a set of rare Roman statues and a wooden figure believed to be 2,000 years old.