Fulford isn’t sure whether the ritual was related to fertility—it’s difficult to say at this point. But he is convinced that some sort of ritual occurred, as the deposit matches a pattern of several other deposits found. One in Silchester is only about 30 miles away, for example, and has dogs, ravens and a carved knife handle depicting mating dogs.
Duncan Garrow, an archaeologist at the University of Reading and Green’s Ph.D. supervisor notes that further archaeological work in the surrounding area could reveal more about what people were doing in Ewell and what kinds of rituals they might have been up to.
Was the bone deposit Roman or British?
It’s difficult to say exactly who was doing the sacrificing, if any occurred. Officially, Romans disapproved of human sacrifice, and the practice would have been controversial under their rule, Green says. Some Roman writers believed it was going on before conquest, and may have even used it as an excuse for conquering Britain. But there isn’t a lot of evidence either way as the island didn’t have any written records until after the Roman conquest, and some of the Roman accounts are dubious, Green says.
Chemical signatures in the bones of three of the humans suggest that one grew up very close by, and the others from not too far away; they likely weren’t Roman. “It looks like they are local people that are ending up in there,” Green says.
Garrow notes that aside from being very large, the Ewell bone deposit otherwise appears similar in composition to ritual deposits from Stone Age Britain. “It’s amazing to see deposits like that in Roman Britain,” Garrow says. “It looks strange, but familiarly strange.”
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