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Burial 870 excavated by Sara

I have just finished excavating the best preserved Roman burial , an inhumation Context: 870 on the site so far. Unfortunately there where no goodies (technically called grave goods) apart from a couple of sherds of pottery. The burial did contain seven quite large and robust iron nails which indicate that there was a coffin.

Although this is so far the best preserved skeleton the condition of the body was poor. It was quite hard during the lifting to keep a lot of the bones in one piece. Hopefully some of them will be in good enough condition to give us more information about the burial after they’ve been examined by an osteologist. At the moment we are guessing that the body is that of a juvenile as it is quite short at circa 148cm (although interestingly enough that’s 1cm taller than one of our diggers Liz…). If the burial is that if a juvenile it could explain why it is not very high status. The osteologist will also hopefully gives us a sex which we obviously have no idea about now.

This burial is hopefully an example of things to come on this site. Zone 1 has seen a lot of post-Medieval activity that basically truncated or even destroyed most of the earlier archaeology. After this week we will move into Zone 2 which should have more Roman features and less deep dull soakaways! Unfortunately, I’ll be leaving at the end of next week so I won’t be seeing a lot of, what should be, the best archaeology in Prescot St, but I’m happy enough that at least I get to dig one Roman burial before I leave.