Chilling mass grave of over 50 Iron Age skeletons shows 'gangland-style executions'
Radiocarbon dating of human remains found in 1936 revealed that victims were killed nearly a century before the Romans arrived.
A mass grave of more than 50 skeletons from Iron Age Britain has revealed bloody tribal warfare, according to new research.
Romans have been blamed for mass slaughtering native tribes for nearly a century. However, radiocarbon dating of human remains found in 1936 revealed that victims were killed nearly a century before the Romans arrived, the Daily Mail reported.
"Localized gangland infighting" led to the death of these natives as the rival groups fought each other to control territory and used "lethal weapon injuries" to warn others.
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Dr. Miles Russell, the principal academic in prehistoric and Roman archaeology at Bournemouth University, who has spent years investigating the burial site at Maiden Castle near Dorchester, said, "We can now say quite categorically that these individuals died a long time before the Romans arrived and over a long period of time, not in a single battle for a hill fort."
The remains of more than 50 people were found here nine decades ago.
He called the deaths of these people "gangland-style executions."
"People were dragged up there and put to death as a way of one group exerting control over another. These were Mafia-like families. Game of Thrones-like barons with one dynasty wiping out another to control trade links and protection rackets for power," Russell said.
The people who were discovered had visible signs of torture.
"Most of them had cranial trauma with no sign of defensive wounds. They were repeatedly struck with a sword to the head with the skulls smashed to oblivion," Russell explained, adding, "You are talking overkill, not a single death blow. These were gangland executions carried out in a very prominent and obvious way as a warning to others."
These executions took place over a long time period, between the late first century BC and the early first century AD. This predates the Romans, who arrived in Dorset in 43 AD.
The "war cemetery" at Maiden Castle is one of the nation's most famous discoveries.
The tale about the Romans started in 1936 when Sir Mortimer Wheeler, a dig director, suggested that the deaths of the people on the mass grave resulted from a "furious but ultimately futile defence of the hillfort against an all-conquering Roman legion."
"Since the 1930s, the story of Britons fighting Romans at one of the largest hillforts in the country has become a fixture in historical literature," Russell said. "The tale of innocent men and women of the local Durotriges tribe being slaughtered by Rome is powerful and poignant. It features in countless articles, books, and TV documentaries."
"It has become a defining moment in British history, marking the sudden and violent end of the Iron Age. The trouble is it doesn't appear to have actually happened," he added.
Archaeological evidence presents "a case of Britons killing Britons and the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification," he said.
The Romans "committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them" after they landed in Essex and "fought organised armies of kings or queens in defensive positions" to invade.
"But as they moved further west the people and communities they encountered were more scattered and was very difficult for them to dictate to people that they were under their control. By this stage, the Romans were more about exploiting territory and getting money out of it. In the Mendips, it was extracting lead, in the Weald in Sussex, it was iron, and in Dorset, it was farming," Russell said.
