User:Prioryman/Great Ellingham Roman cemetery

The Great Ellingham Roman cemetery is the largest Romano-British burial site ever found in the county of Norfolk. It was discovered by chance during an excavation carried out on the site of a planned housing development in the village of Great Ellingham near Attleborough in November 2011. Work on the site continued until July 2012, by which time 85 burials had been found.

The excavation was carried out by Chris Birks Archaeology as part of the planning process that followed an application to develop the site for residential use. It was co-funded by the landowner and developer. Since the 1950s there had been a number of earlier finds of complete skeletons and individual bones in the vicinity and in 1958 a cemetery was found along with Roman, Saxon and medieval pottery. One of the finds included a female skeleton with a Roman coin dating to 270 AD inside the skull.

An initial trial trench unearthed five graves and found that the cemetery overlapped the area that was scheduled for development. As the remainder of the burials were uncovered, it was found that nodules of flint had been placed around the skull, pelvis or feet of several skeletons. The purpose of this apparent ritual practice is unknown. One skeleton had been decapitated and its skull placed between its feet – perhaps someone who had been executed, or maybe a murder victim. Such "deviant burials" are known from elsewhere in Norfolk but it is unclear why bodies were treated in this way. It may have been a form of posthumous punishment, or alternatively may have been a ritual practice intended to get the deceased more quickly into the afterlife.

Only one "grave good" was found at the site – an iron finger ring in one of the graves. This may not have belonged to the dead person in whose grave it was found, but could have been dropped in by a mourner. The near-complete lack of grave goods suggests that the deceased were Romano-British farmers, who would not have been wealthy. According to Norfolk County Council's historic environment manager, David Gurney, "Given the later Roman date of the cemetery, the alignment and the lack of grave goods, these are likely to be Christian burials." It is not known where the deceased came from; the modern village of Great Ellingham is not Roman but is an Anglo-Saxon foundation, named after a man named Elli or Ella. However, Chris Birks, who excavated the site, suggests that "it must have been a large, or at least long-lived, settlement given the number of burials we have found in only a small part of the full extent of the cemetery." Pottery evidence from some of the other graves have enabled archaeologists to date the cemetery to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD.

The discovery represents the largest single ancient cemetery found in Norfolk, the previous largest discovery only being about half the size. It greatly increases the number of Roman known burials in Norfolk, as only around 300 had previously been found. David Gurney comments that "this discovery is a fantastic opportunity to look at these skeletons, to find out clues about their life and diets." The skeletons have been exhumed for further analysis and the finger ring is now held by the Castle Museum in Norwich.