A complete skeleton found in a Gallo-Roman grave in western Belgium is not a Roman individual after all, but rather a bizarre mix of people spanning thousands of years.
Laid to rest on the right side with tucked-up legs, the remains feature long bones from seven unrelated Stone Age men and women – of varying ages and separated by several centuries – and the skull of a Roman woman who died 2500 years later.
The assembled skeleton reflects true craftsmanship and knowledge of anatomy, but the question of who assembled it – and why – remains a mystery, says at the Free University of Brussels in Belgium.
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“This really gives more insight into the kinds of social and cultural aspects of life and death in both these time periods,” she says. “It’s like, Romans cremated their dead and put them in the ground and that’s it? Well, evidently not. They might have done way more than we thought.”
In the 1970s, researchers found the full skeleton in a 2nd-century Roman cremation cemetery in Pommeroeul, Belgium. A Roman bone pin placed near the head led scientists to believe this was a Roman burial, and the skeleton was presented as such at the in Viroinval, Belgium.
More recently, however, Veselka and her colleagues had doubts. The skeleton’s side-lying position was typical of Early Bronze Age burials, in contrast to Roman burials with people laid flat on their backs. And despite being perfectly aligned, the vertebrae looked like a mix of adolescent and senior bones, and the femur looked too big for the pelvis. “I started thinking, okay, something really weird is going on,” she says.
So the team ran radiocarbon dating on the arm and leg bones, the skull and five toes. They also ran ancient DNA analysis on several long bones and the skull. To their surprise, their results pointed to at least seven unrelated individuals spanning several generations 4212 to 4445 years ago.
Radiocarbon dating on the skull was inconclusive, but DNA analyses revealed it belonged to a Gallo-Roman woman whose genes closely matched those of two young siblings buried in a Roman cemetery 150 kilometres to the east about 1800 years ago.
Archaeologists know ancient people would occasionally manipulate human bones, , and even crafting tools from them and possibly consuming their marrow.
However, this is the first discovery of a skeleton with such a wide mix of ages and cultures, says Veselka. It was particularly convincing as a single individual, reflecting the builders’ knowledge of human anatomy, she adds. “They knew what they were doing, for sure.”
Bronze Age tribes might have collected bones to create a single skeleton as a symbol of unity, she suggests, and the Romans might have added a skull out of respect for the dead if they accidentally broke the original Neolithic one while digging graves. An alternative theory is that – for yet unknown reasons – the Romans built the entire construction.
What exactly happened in this Gallo-Roman grave remains a “fascinating puzzle”, says at the University of Bern in Switzerland, who was not involved in the study. The fact that the body was reconstructed, probably twice across thousands of years, offers evidence of how human bodies are “continuously conceptualised and charged with cultural and social meanings” across time, he says.
, also at the University of Bern, thinks the study underscores the vital importance of combining modern techniques with both new and old discoveries. “This is how we can make visible what is usually archaeologically invisible,” she says. “It’s really intriguing.”
While some people have told Veselka that she has found a “Neolithic Frankenstein”, she finds the term disrespectful. “These were someone’s loved ones,” she says. “If you call someone’s grandma Frankenstein, it’s inappropriate.”
Antiquity
Article amended on 4 November 2024
The number of people whose bones make up the skeleton was corrected in the headline.
