An early medieval cemetery unearthed under student accommodation at Cambridge University has been described as “one of the most exciting finds in Anglo-Saxon archeology since the 19th century”.
King’s College discovered the “extensive” cemetery, which contained more than 60 graves, after demolishing a group of 1930s buildings that had recently housed graduates and staff west of the city, to make way for more modern rooms.
About 200 items in the tombs, including bronze brooches, pearl necklaces, swords, short blades, pottery, and glass flasks, have been systematically discovered. Most date from the first Anglo-Saxon period (c400-650 AD), although evidence of Iron Age structures and Roman earthworks has also been found.
Dr. Caroline Goodson, who teaches early medieval history at King’s, said the human remains they found were remarkably “well-preserved.” “The alkaline soil, typical of here, has not decomposed the bones.”
This is significant, as it will allow archaeologists to apply state-of-the-art scientific techniques to reveal the diet and DNA of the dead, allowing migration and family relationships to be analyzed.
Goodson said the excavators had been “surprised” to find so many graves and such an extensive medieval cemetery surrounded by Roman ditches and so close to the remains of Roman Cambridge. According to Bede Ecclesiastical history, which was written in the 8th century, Cambridge was abandoned, like many other Roman cities, when the Romans withdrew their military forces from England during the 5th century. “We already know that Cambridge was not completely abandoned. But what we are seeing now is a bigger and clearer picture of life in post-Roman settlements. ”
Goodson speculates that the people living in Cambridgeshire were a mixture of descendants of earlier Roman populations and recent migrants to mainland Britain, living in a post-imperial world.
Site of excavation
“They no longer live as the Romans did, eat differently, dress differently and find different ways to exploit the land. They change the way of life during a period of considerable fluidity ”.
Some of the findings raise questions about the emotional connections people who lived at the time of the burials may have felt towards the Romans who lived in Cambridge before them. In a tomb, archaeologists found a body buried with what appears to be a piece of late Roman glass in the shape of a small barrel to store wine.
“It looks like a classical Roman object that is reused in a post-Roman context, as serious property.” Another tomb looks like a typical late 5th century Roman burial, suggesting that there may have been continuity in the use of the cemetery from the Roman period onwards. “It would be really interesting,” Goodson said.
To date, archaeologists have found no “obvious evidence” that people living in the sixth century continued to choose to bury their dead near late Roman tombs, but few cemeteries of this size have been scientifically excavated using modern methods and technologies, such as now radiocarbon dating techniques and isotopic analysis.
“It would be great to put it very clearly, and we’ll need a broad set of carbon-14 dates to do that, that we have people using this place from the 5th to the 7th century,” Goodson says. “We can see that the burial of the dead and the treatment of their bodies is particularly significant for the living in a way different from the rest of the post-Roman world.” This points to a different worldview and a different “cosmology”: “It’s a new form of commemoration.”
He hopes to find out if anyone in the cemetery died due to the Justinian plague, a pandemic that lasted all over Europe in the 1950s.
“I’m interested to know if he was also in Cambridge and what relationship there is with what was happening most.”