FRAUGHT WITH HIGH TRAGEDY: A CONTEXTUAL AND CHRONOLOGICAL RECONSIDERATION OF THE MAIDEN CASTLE IRON AGE ‘WAR CEMETERY’ (ENGLAND)

Abstract

The Iron Age ‘war cemetery’ of Maiden Castle hillfort, Dorset, England, is one of the most internationally celebrated of British archaeological discoveries, levels of trauma recorded on skeletons found there being interpreted as evidence for a Roman massacre. A new radiocarbon dating programme and reanalysis of the burial patterning, presented here for the first time, shows that the inhumations actually fall into temporal clusters of lethal violence, plausibly spanning multiple generations, spread mostly between the early and middle decades of the first century AD. This is suggestive of increasing societal stress in the decades leading up to, rather than as a product of, the Roman invasion of AD 43.