The Ancients - Decoding the Roman Dead

Episode Date: July 25, 2021

Often known as ‘Britain’s first town’, Colchester is a city rich in ancient history and on 24 July 2021, a new exhibition will open at the Colchester Museum revealing more about some of its earliest Roman occupants. Called ‘Decoding the Roman Dead’, the exhibition focuses around cremations found in the area around Colchester dating to almost 2,000 years ago. Thanks to new scientific methods, the team have been able to analyse these burnt remains and find out some astonishing details about who these people were. From gender to pathology to where in the Roman Empire these people came from. To talk all about the new exhibition, and to shine a light on the wealth of information archaeologists can learn from ancient cremations, Tristan chatted to Dr Carolina Lima and Glynn Davis. Carolina and Glynn are two of the curators of the exhibition.To find out more, visit their website: https://colchester.cimuseums.org.uk/dtrd/

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like The Ancients ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. It's the Ancients on History Hit. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host.

And in today's podcast, well, this weekend, we see the opening of a brand new exhibition at the Colchester Museum. It is called Decoding the Dead, all about some incredible archaeological work that has gone on looking at the remains of some ancient Roman cremations discovered in the area around Colchester. In this podcast, I chatted to two of the curators of this new exhibition, Carolina Lima and Glyn Davis. It was wonderful to chat to both of them in person about this new exhibition, and I hope you enjoy this podcast as much as I did recording it.

So without further ado, here's Carolina and here's Glyn. Glyn, Carolina, thank you so much both for coming on the podcast. You're welcome. It's great to be here. Thanks for having us. Now, no problem at all, because you and your team, Decoding the Dead, this incredible project at the Colchester Museum. Normally in ancient history, ancient Mediterranean history, we have to focus on the big names, the big figures who we've got all this literature surviving about and some archaeology surviving about, emperors, Alexander the Great, etc. and some archaeology surviving about, emperors, Alexander the Great, etc. But you guys, you're doing the awesome job.

You are looking at archaeology that is telling us more about these everyday people from this early stage in Colchester's Roman history. Well, yeah, I think this is what archaeology can do best, I think. It can get down to that individual. I mean, we often talk about the Romans, don't we? This homogenous group, but who were the Romans and I think by looking into collections such as ours at Colchester and we've got a fantastic Roman collection and indeed elements of it that have not been studied and that's what this project is doing it's shining that new light and we're going to really bury down and find out about people themselves, because, of course, we're looking at human cremations, the people themselves as they were burnt and buried.

So when we're looking at these cremations, in the time frame, I mentioned early Roman Colchester. But Carolina, when about are we talking about then if we're talking about early Roman Colchester and we're talking about these cremations in particular? Roman culture stat? And we're talking about these cremations in particular. Yeah, well, that's actually a really good question, because cremations are actually the primary Roman funerary practice in the first, I mean, certainly the first two centuries of their occupation, really first three centuries, it's only really with Christianity that we start getting inhumations, so the whole skeletons, you do get some before, but it only becomes common practice then. So when we're talking about early, it's an interesting term because we are talking about three centuries. It's not necessarily all the first earliest people.

And that's what this project is looking at, really, where we've got a selection of people and it covers primarily the first two centuries. But they are earlier than our archaeological record and publications really focus so much more on inhumations. So these are really earlier Romans than we're used to seeing. I suppose what's also really interesting is we do have maybe a handful of cremations that do date back to what you might call a really early, early part of Colchester's history. And Colchester is quite exceptional here, as it would be alongside London and Verulamium. And some people might know what

I'm going to sort of talk about now, which is the fact that we have this amazing Boudican destruction level throughout the town. If you dig down, you will find this amazing event, this event horizon, which is where Queen Boudica rebelled against the Romans and destroyed this town, as she did with London and as she did with Verulamium or St Albans. And we do have cremations dating just probably, yeah, around this date, maybe just after. So that's an amazing snapshot. Again, this is where you've been talking about these big events, these big names. But of course, we can drill down and find those individuals who would have experienced the conquest of Britain. Maybe they were part of that conquest. You know, they may have retired

here if they were veterans. And we know veterans were settled at Colchester. Or maybe they're not. Maybe they are one of the Brits, the indigenous Britons that are here, who were, we could use the word Romanised, but we see that in the burial practices. They're adopting the Roman culture and the way they do things. I think that's fascinating. So we do get that insight into really, really early Roman Britain and Colchester. But as Carolina says, it's a long time period, actually, that cremation goes on for, even when inhumations come in, which is fascinating in itself. And it's what makes it so surprising that we know so little about them. And we've spent so little time really writing them up and studying them.

Because in this early period Colchester itself and you mentioned like Romanisation but Colchester it does feel like one of those places just before the Boudiccan revolt and all that that you do seem to see more let's say hallmarks of Roman culture appearing at this site which might also I guess help influence why you start seeing these cremations in this Roman manner at that time. Yeah, absolutely. And I think that's why Colchester is such an interesting place to start with to do a project like this. You know, hopefully cremations from other urban and rural sites in Britain are going to be looked at as well. But this is almost the best place because it's the first town in Britain, as we always say. And it's

this hub of Roman culture that kind of is introduced into Iron Age Britain really early on. And so it's really interesting studying, as Glyn says, some of these earliest people from Colchester who would have lived through the conquest, you know, would have lived to see these practices being introduced into everyday life and their societies. And cremation itself, well, that wouldn't have been an alien burial rite and concept to the Iron Age Brits, because they are cremating their dead as well. I suppose it's what goes alongside that. And, you know, the Roman funeral and everything that's involved in that, you know, what we can piece together from our literary sources, as well as archaeologically, could have been a very different thing. But at least that burial, the idea of burning the body, wouldn't have been odd. But the way you do that, the

performance around that, the meaning around that, would have been very different. Absolutely. And I actually really love thinking about cremation as a technology. And Glyn's absolutely right that in the Iron Age, people did cremate people, and they did bury them very similarly to the Romans. They put them in pots and put them in the ground. But it's mostly in the southeast where you're getting all of this connection with the continent. And there's an abundance of Roman material or, as Glyn says, Romanised material coming in. So it's like a technological development that's being introduced in the late Iron Age and then really establishing itself when the Romans finally settle here. All right, you two, I've been really looking forward to this question in particular. Which

of you two is going to talk me through the Roman funeral process at this time? Who volunteers? I think we're both very interested in it. Yeah, so the first thing to say really is there isn't one prescribed Roman funeral. I think everyone can relate to that, that even nowadays there isn't one prescribed British funeral, so there wasn't one prescribed Roman funeral. And a lot of the evidence that we have, we don't have archaeological evidence for what was really going on in the funeral, except for, which we'll talk about, evidence that we can get from cremations now. But other than that, we don't.

And so what we get is a lot of written sources talking about Roman funerals. But mostly this is written by very wealthy men in Italy, and it talks about their funerals. So I'm going to go through that, but keeping in mind that obviously not everyone had that funeral. Essentially, the Romans saw the funeral or actually death as a rite of passage. It wasn't really seen as an ending. It was seen as a sort of moving on to a different stage. And the funeral really reflects that. So when somebody died, their body would be prepared in the home. So the family would all go into mourning. And there was this belief that essentially the person's spirit was still kind of clinging to the living and clinging to the family. So the funeral was also kind of a process of cleansing. So the beginning of the funeral is really the funerary procession, which is where you take the body from the home to the family. So the funeral was also kind of a process of cleansing. So the beginning of the funeral is really the funerary procession, which is where you take the body from the home to the

funeral pyre. So funeral pyres were always burnt. They were always outside cities for various reasons. And so that procession was a huge part of the funeral and it was the biggest spectacle. Generally speaking, it might be where you're displaying your wealth in the most elaborate way. So people would, if you were extremely wealthy, you'd hire actors, musicians. You'd have lots of people at the funeral making a lot of noise. Walking through with the body, you'd hire professional mourners to come and mourn you. Then the body would be cremated on top of a pyre. These pyres would be set up by professionals.

So people actually pay professionals to come and set up their pyre. And then the funeral attendees would gather around the pyre. And actually, we don't talk enough about the fact that a body burning on a pyre is several hours. That's a big part of the funeral. People tend to rush through that. Then they burnt the body and moved on. But actually, no, there's a huge amount of interaction at that time. And musicians are still performing, if you can afford to do that. Then the body was taken and buried. After that, there was one kind of final, I hesitate to say final, but aspect to the funeral, which is the feast. And that could happen right after or a few days after, it sort of depended. But it was really when finally

the spirit was sort of set free. So the family would gather and friends and have a big feast. And that would signify the end of the funeral per se. And then there was after that, because as I say, they didn't really see funerals and death as an end. So it was really important for the Romans to keep this idea of commemorating their dead and revisiting the grave. And that was a huge part. So it's a hard question to answer because it's such a prolonged event. But that's a basic summary. And I think Roman funerals would be such alien performances to us. And, you know, we're talking, you know, if you had the money to put on something quite elaborate. I mean, they're almost carnivalesque in what they're doing. And

yes, they are sombre events. Someone has died and that person needs to be honoured in the correct ways. But at the same time, they could be irreverent, almost. We hear of, you know, in Rome and very wealthy elites, the aristocratic society, or even emperors having mimes performing at their funerals, who are mocking, well, maybe mocking, but impersonating with a death mask of the emperor, trying to imitate. And that's so interesting, what that's drawing on in Roman society and ideas. And, you know, I think a funeral like that would be incredibly alien to our eyes now, especially with the amount of noise, you know, of maybe wailing, weeping, that emotion alongside all this performance, this sound, this music. Whether we'd see anything like

that in Colchester, perhaps, you know, you've got some of the wealthiest people, the wealthiest Romans in Colchester at this time. But at the same time, you know, as Carolina said, there are many who are not going to get a funeral like that. We think of like the urban poor and the destitute, the lower classes in that sense, criminals, etc. You know, what's their burial? How is their memory being honoured? Maybe it's not. So it would be really interesting to just be a fly on the wall and see these different performances taking place and then when that doesn't happen outside of Colchester's walls all that time ago. It is really interesting to think, and I know some of the most elaborate cases that they have like a chariot, they have the actor in the chariot wearing the death mask of the person

who's recently died. It is quite interesting to think, as you say, Glyn, right there, and you fantastically explained before then, Carolina, whether there could have been chariots going down the streets of early Roman culture in the first century AD from these most prominent Roman families. I mean, just before we go on to the pots themselves, because they're really interesting at culture. Do we have an idea of the elites that would have been in Colchester at this time? Would they have been primarily just Roman elites or are we thinking Romano-British elites? That's a really interesting question. I think it's probably a mix, but are these people living together and working even together? Perhaps not. So we know at Colchester, you've kind of got your

Roman stamp. We see that in the archaeology of the town. You know, the Romans did this. They came along and stamped the town down. You get your baths and your forum. And here in Colchester, you have your temples, et cetera, that infrastructure. And you have the people in place to do that. And you would have had the governor, the procurator, etc. And all these officials, and these are wealthy people, and they bring with them their retinues and their staff. You know, there's a lot and lot of people who come here to support the running of the empire here in Britain. And in these early days, that's where it's happening. It's at Colchester, before that later moves to London after the the Boudiccan rebellion so yeah there

are a number of elites here and even the soldiers who are retiring here you know they have wealth they have money um I think of one of the most famous tombstones from Britain that's in our lovely museum this is of uh Thassilis and he's getting those plugs in there buddy it's all good it's all good it's it's a fantasticstone. There's something quite ironic about the tombstone of Phacelus, who's a centurion. We have his remains. They were buried next to his tombstone. It kind of makes sense in a way.

But of course, rarely do we have a tombstone and the remains that are associated with that. It's the fact that Boudicca came and she absolutely obliterated the town of Colchester. And we know that through the archaeology. The archaeology tells us nothing is left standing. and that would have spread out to the cemetery areas that surrounded the walls of Colchester the necropolis as the Romans would have known of it it's like a city of the dead that's how they would view these cemetery areas outside they came along

they would have knocked every single tombstone down and course, down comes Phacelus's tombstone, protecting his remains underneath. So the irony of her destruction is that in a way he's been preserved. And so we have his remains on display in his lovely leather. And it's quite a fascinating thing next to his tombstone in Colchester Museum. And we know from the tombstone that his slaves or ex-slaves set this up. So here's Centurion with his ex-slaves. So he has money, has a household that have people working for him in it. And the fact that he has freed them, but they still honour him by setting this up. So it's not his immediate family, you know, a wife, children.

I find that it's just fascinating. And this is what we're talking about, trying to understand people as individuals and what we can glean from that. Yeah, I love that question of essentially, who are the locals, who are not the locals, who are the foreigners, so to speak. We're really looking into that in this exhibition. And with this project, you know, what does it mean to be Romano-British? We have evidence of people who grew up in Britain, whose parents were a retired soldier, and they have a very Roman name, and they serve in the legions, and then potentially serve abroad in the legions, but they come from Colchester, they were born here, and they were

raised in a very Roman lifestyle. If both their parents were Roman, potentially, one of them was British. How would they have seen themselves? Would they have even had this concept of Romano-British? I mean, we know that certainly people did associate with the places where they came from, because when they erect funerary inscriptions, it's not uncommon for them to specify that they come from this place. So it obviously must have had some kind of meaning to them. But it's how they communicate that. And we are looking at that. And part of this project is trying to understand where these people came from. You know, we're getting evidence of a huge variety of elite cremations, so to speak. So people with

extremely expensive burials, and they're locals, they come from Colchester. And then we've got very simple greyware pots manufactured in Colchester. That's the cremation. And it turns out they're not from Colchester. They've come from somewhere else. So what does it really mean? And what did it mean to the individuals? I think, you know, it's what we're working towards. And it's certainly what we're trying to do here. What's really interesting about the archaeology of Colchester, or perhaps even a little bit further afield, so beyond the Roman centre of Colchester, is the archaeology of Colchester, or perhaps even a little bit further afield, so beyond the Roman centre of Colchester, is the archaeology in places like Stamway, and major excavation and

research by the Colchester Archaeological Trust have revealed something quite interesting there, which is we're seeing British burials and cremations, so local Britons, that's the interpretation of the evidence, but also quite elite. Now, this is quite interesting. So perhaps, you know, we mentioned the local elites and we know sort of the area here goes hand in hand with the Romans. That's partly why Boudicca comes down here all that time ago. But perhaps the elites, the local elites are not actually sort of living in the Roman centre. They're further afield, perhaps in Stamway in this instance, and they've got the best of both worlds, maybe.

You know, they're arm's length from the Romans. They don't have to put up with that if that's how they feel about it. The subjugation which they're under in some senses, but they're benefiting from maybe all the cultural contact of that and indeed the trade links and the material coming in. And we see that merging of material culture, as we'd call it, what's been locally made, how people are locally identifying, as well as what they're buying up as Roman goods.

Let's focus on the cremations themselves now from Colchester that you guys have been working on. And you mentioned the containers, the ceramics, the pots, which these cremations have been discovered in, some remarkable pots, because, Caroline, there's some really striking details on some of these pots surviving. Yeah, so I think it's an important point to make that not everyone got a pot. So what we often say are unearned cremations. You know, we certainly know that they would have existed, or cremations that were placed in pots that wouldn't have,

or boxes that wouldn't have survived, anything made of wood, leather. So it's sort of this kind of silent majority, as you would, that lived in Colchester and that died here that we don't have evidence for. So we're always looking at, you know, people who could at least afford that. But we do get a huge range. So we get, as I mentioned, the simplest, most standard greyware vessels that are locally made. We get jars being reused, storage jars being used as cremation vessels. And then we get extremely elaborate ceramic vessels, the beautiful face pots,

the wonderful Colchester vase, you know, all these incredible objects. But then we also get cremation urns made from glass, for example, and we get them made of lead. And we know that lead, they're the rarest ones that we get. And we assume the most expensive, they're certainly the most expensive to produce. And glass vessels are sort of close behind them. So we do get a big range. And in regards to these cremations in Colchester that you guys have been focusing on, how long have we known about these cremations? Well, the whole point of the project was to shine a light on what we would call our historic or our antiquarian collections. So these are actually things that are dug up well over 100 years ago and they have been carefully looked every carefully displayed but they've been carefully looked after and many of these are

in the museum stores you know many museums around the country have a massive store collections and just as we're doing every now and again you want to shine new light on them and find new avenues of research and I suppose really it's with advances in specialism, especially around osteology, so the study of excavated human remains, that this project came about because we realised, you know, we have all these cremations and they've never been looked at. They're almost overlooked in some senses, literally, because they're in pots. And if they were on display in the museum, you can't see in them half the time. display in the museum, you can't see in them half the time. And for me, this was the impetus to re-look at these because I've some experience of how osteologists can glean huge amounts of

information, especially from inhumations. But I knew that cremations, that there's been masses of advances in how we can study cremated remains. And I think they are very much overlooked and in fact, still overlooked. Specialists will say people prefer looking at inhumations because so much more of the skeleton survives and you lose that. But cremations still have something to say. And in fact, if we're saying cremations are the early burial rite to exclude them and not put the effort you would into them that you would for other inhumation burials, well, really, you're missing out on a huge period of Roman history in Britain and how people are burying their dead. So I think anything you can glean from that is going to add to that picture. And that's really what

brought this project about. Yeah, and I think that people don't associate as much with cremations as they do with an inhumation. I think if you visit a museum and you see a skeleton laid out in a coffin, you know, we all understand that and we all see a human and we feel an emotional connection with that person as a person. But cremations, it's a bit more complicated because Roman cremations, and this is the question I get most often with this project, is how do you look at a cremation? It's just ash. But of course, you know, Roman pyres and Roman cremation technology wasn't as advanced as it of course, Roman pyres and Roman cremation technology wasn't as advanced as it is now. And what we actually have is sometimes rather large bone fragments that, as Glyn says, osteologists can actually identify. But it's still quite

difficult to look at those bones and see a person. And that's really what this project is doing. We're doing that osteology and we're identifying a huge amount of information about these individuals and then displaying them in this exhibition so people can actually go and see them and relate to them as people who lived in Colchester 2,000 years ago. Catastrophic warfare, bloody revolutions and violent ideological battles. I'm James Rogers and over on the Warfare podcast, we're exploring the vast history of ferocious global conflict. We've got the classics.

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has created some sort of effect to local communities. Subscribe to Warfare from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts. Join us on the front line of military history. Right, talk me through, and feel free to go into the detail, but I am the average Joe Bloggs on this because we're going into the science stuff. Talk me through these new scientific developments in the archaeological field that is helping you find out all this information about these cremations? So as Glyn said it's primarily osteological advancements so you know osteology is the study of human remains and essentially you have to be a trained osteologist to obviously look

at a cremation so you have to be able to examine a skeleton but when you're looking at a cremation you're looking at a skeleton that's been burnt. You're looking at fragments that have been misshapen, shattered in the flame, you know, discolored, which makes it obviously predictably a lot more difficult to identify things. But we can do it. It's a bit more limited, but there are ways to tell the biological sex of an individual, if the right bones survive, the age that they were at the time they died, if there's any traces of any pathologies that they might have had, so any diseases they might have lived with. And also, which I think is very interesting and very exciting, going beyond just looking at that individual, there's a lot that we can say about the actual pyre and the way that

they were burnt, which tells us a little bit about the funeral, which, as I said, we don't have archaeological evidence for. It's very rare to have any kind of archaeological evidence about it. So that's one of the most interesting things. We can actually tell the intensity of the heat and how well maintained the pyre was. I mentioned that people paid professionals. So that's sort of the osteology that we do. Then another aspect, one of the most important aspects of this project, was to do isotope analysis, which is where we're looking

at essentially isotope signatures in the bone to see where people grew up. Now, this is basically impacted by the geology of the area where you spend your early childhood. So we can match it to what we know about current geologies of areas of Britain, but also outside in Europe, and find out where someone spent their early childhood. And we've done that, and it's actually never been done for Roman cremations. So this kind of study became popular a couple of decades ago, but it was only done to inhumations. And the issue with cremations is that the fire damages the bone in a way that affects the readings of the isotope, so you couldn't really do it. But scientists have discovered that we can use strontium isotopes specifically that are in the petrous bone,

which is a bone in your skull right by your ear, to get these readings and find out this information. So it's a whole new area of study that we're doing for the first time here. Very cool. So then moving on from that, you've talked about so many of the interesting aspects there, and particularly about the funerals themselves, what we can tell about the funerals themselves. So let's go on to that now. We've been bigging it up. Let's talk about some of these results that you found from your works on decoding the dead on these cremations. First of all, let's focus on the funerals themselves. What have these cremations told us? What has the science told us about the funerals themselves of these people who lived in early Roman Colchester.

So when we're looking at the cremations, as I said, one of the main things that we're looking at is the discoloration of the bone, which can actually tell us the intensity of the heat at which it was burnt, which basically gives us an indication of the size of the pyre and how well looked after it was. So people paid people to set up their pyres and to keep feeding it, keep giving it fuel to keep it going, but also to move the remains on top of the pyre. And essentially, if you have an extremely well-burnt cremation, it's probably because it was a very well-maintained pyre.

If you just let the pyre go, it wouldn't have the same effect. And you can essentially draw some conclusions about what that individual or their family could afford for them. So we have cremations that are far more poorly burnt, where, you know, potentially they couldn't afford the same level of care as the other ones. And it's really interesting, because we've got studies from rural sites as well. And it seems quite consistent in rural sites. Apparently, this is an early area of study. But it seems like in rural sites, people have very well built pyres. And generally speaking, it might have been because the families did it. And so they took extra care and they maintained it. But when you go to urban sites, like Colchester, like London, there's a much

bigger range, which probably means that there's a lot more options of who you could go to to perform your cremation. And there's the kind of cheaper options, and there's the more expensive options potentially. I think fragmentation and sort of the burning temperatures and what we're looking at here gives a really personal insight, doesn't it, into how that person was honoured on their part. And I suppose the attention to detail and the effort put in, you know, from the preliminary studies of rural sites, you can imagine a community coming together and putting far more hours into the burning of that individual. It's interesting because I would have assumed the opposite

at the start of this project, that in the big city, you've got a bit of money, you've got access to these professionals. People are doing this for a living. But we're seeing far more of the majority of these poorly burned cremations. Maybe these professionals are overworked. Maybe they've got to get through and on to the next one, you know, where they're busy places. Although many more people in Roman Britain are actually living out in the countryside, even though urban centres are dense, you know, far more people are living out there rurally. So I don't know, it's sort of preliminary studies, but it gives an insight into, you know, why is that happening

and what does that mean? You know, was it a problem in some senses? Did it matter? Maybe not if, you know, the individual can still be collected, buried and honoured there and, you know, there would have been streets lined with tombs and areas for burying the dead. So it throws light onto it,

but almost we want to ask more questions. In fact, what we really want to do is more study. We want to extend the study into, you know, many more cremations that we have in the museum stores. Yeah. And in a sense, I think it's important to divorce sort of what we as archaeologists are interested in versus what the actual experience of Romans at a funeral would be. So obviously we're talking about all these technical terms of heat intensity and, you know, adding fuel and so on. And we can see that in the discoloration of the bone. But really, to the attendees of the funeral, it's like the size of the pyre and how long it burns for and how big is it. It's a spectacle. And that's what they're

experiencing. So that's what we're really interested in. And more studies like this will really give us a much better understanding. I think you guys have just like hit the nail on the head with almost all archaeology, isn't it? Whether it's on Hadrian's Wall or whether it's down here or wherever, that it might answer one question, isn't it? When you get all these results, but then it opens up a whole can of worms of like 12 new questions that you want to know the answers for. And that's from like the amazing amazing maybe also frustrating things of archaeology Glyn is laughing at that so I and Carolina is nodding so that is good to see um let's focus

then on though these specific cremations I mean how many are we talking we talking about was it 40 odd yeah so um well in the museum we found just under 160 at the moment obviously there are more cremations that have been excavated from Colchester that aren't yet in the museum stores. So it's quite a large number. But the ones that we've looked at in this project for many reasons were 40 that have had their osteology analysed and 22 that have had their isotopes analysed. And it was really important to us when we were selecting because we're looking at a sample. We've already talked about the unearned cremations and the ones that we don't have. So we're already looking at a bit of a sample and then we're taking a sample of that sample. So it was really important to us that it really reflected the people who lived in Colchester

and not just the elites, for example. So we really chose a range. You know, all we had to go on really was the pots that they were buried in. But we chose a range from the rarest lead urns to the most common greyware. And in the exhibition, that's really what we're trying to display as well. We don't want to display just the wealthy people who came from abroad or the wealthy people from Colchester. We wanted to show everyone. And in regards to these particular cremations then that are going to be on the display,

Glyn, what have the results told us about their ages and their gender? Whether you're in your running era, Pilates era or yoga era, dive into Peloton workouts that work with you. From meditating at your kid's game to mastering a strength program, they've got everything you need to keep knocking down your goals. No pressure to be who you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton. Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca. It's really interesting, actually. We've got quite the mix.

Even though it's a small sample, there's a sort of split between male and female, or those that have been biologically sexed as male and female. Quite a range of ages, although older people sort of dominate. But we really do have a range. So in our lovely small sample, we can show an awful lot, actually, and paint a real picture of some of the individuals who lived and died here at Colchester almost 2,000 years ago. we can show an awful lot actually and paint a real picture of some of the individuals who

lived and died here at Colchester almost 2,000 years ago. One of my favourites is now she's affectionately been called the Little Old Lady and I have to use the word there's affection in that and it's interesting how we as archaeologists and curators we kind of humanise these remains and who these people are and we give them names and I mean mean, that's done in an affectionate way. But why do we call her the little old lady? Well, it's because the osteological analysis has revealed that she was most probably elderly. She had quite a bit of pathology, mainly osteoarthritis. You know, so start to build that picture up in your mind of looking at this woman potentially stooping, I don't know, or in pain.

You know, there's a fair bit of osteoarthritis there. And she is buried in quite a simple little tomb. And it is a tomb. When I say a tomb, you might think of some grand structure. But it's actually reused Roman tiles, roof tiles. And it's a lovely little thing when it would have been buried. And she's in her urn, a very simple greyware pot with just a few other grave goods. So grave goods are sort of any things that really get buried as part of the funeral. Just a few local pots. But maybe it's interesting that these are local wares. And actually Colchester had a really big pottery industry. And it's so maybe not hard to source these things. So already we've built up

a lovely picture there of someone and we can start to imagine what her life would have been here in Colchester, what she did for a living, who her family were, you know the burial here given some attention actually. So yeah little old lady as I say that's a really loving term we've given to her and hopefully that as I say paints a picture of her. I say, that's a really loving term we've given to her. And hopefully that, as I say, paints a picture of her. Yeah, I think that's really interesting, the ages and sexes of the individuals, because we have found exactly the same number of females and males. And we found quite a lot of children. And it just ties back to what you were talking about in the beginning,

and Glyn spoke about as well, about how archaeology is really about the people who don't have a voice in the beginning, and Glynne spoke about as well, about how archaeology is really about the people who don't have a voice in the historical record. Historical records are almost always based around the kind of wealthy men who write them. But when you actually get down to the archaeology and we're examining individuals, we have the same exact number, and we get this opportunity to look at them as equals, which is just impossible to do from the history. But there was some really interesting dynamics as well. We also found it was quite common to have two individuals in one urn. And quite a lot of those were an adult and a child, which is just a really interesting thing that we didn't know. I mean,

people who had studied cremations, which is, again, still quite a recent thing, had already identified that sometimes there were multiple individuals in a single vessel, but we actually found quite a lot of them. And that age dynamic is really interesting. Now, it's important to say that, of course, when you're looking at bone fragments, it's easier to identify a child and an adult as being different, or an elderly person and an adult, which can lead to why we're finding quite a lot of those. But it's still really interesting, because knowing what we know about how seriously Romans took burying their dead and revisiting the graves, that there's probably a connection between those two individuals.

Even ageing cremations, individuals from cremation burials, I think it's interesting the technicality behind it because, you know, bone shrinks. And it's interesting where we've had very old antiquarian reports saying burial of a child. And our osteologists have said, well, it's not a child. They've not factored in bone shrinkage under these huge intensities of heat. So you really need to know your osteology. You really need to know the human skeleton. And you need to have spent a long time studying cremations and the metrics of it to understand, you know, what are we looking at here? And there's several children who've been aged to adults. It will also present itself when you're sexing the skeleton as male and female. You know, if you're going off metrics, females or parts of the bone that can be sexed as female would be smaller. But have you taken into account that bone shrinkage,

for instance? So I'm always fascinated by the technical skill of an osteologist and how they bring that in. You need to know your Roman bones, don't you? Now, going on from that, Carolina, I'd like to ask you about where some of these people came from, because there are some really interesting cases from your results. Yeah, so of the isotope analysis that we carried out, we actually found that just under a quarter of the people we've examined didn't come from Colchester. Now, what that means, essentially, is that they've come from either elsewhere in Britain, or they've come from somewhere in the Empire. Those people have come to Colchester from afar, potentially, even from within Britain. I think the mobility there is really, really

interesting. And we know people moved around and we would expect, you know, at the start of this project, we expected to find people from further afield. Why? Well, because of course we have the Roman army here and we know they're being drawn from different provinces, especially in the early period that we've come from Italy, say, Spain, places in Gaul. Marcus Favonius Fassilis, I mentioned him earlier, Fassilis' tombstone. Now, he's most likely an Italian. So in some ways, it's not surprising, but it's just having another avenue in the science to back that up. And we've got individuals who may have come as far away as Italy and potentially even Greece. I think for me, the locals are really interesting

too. As much as this idea of finding the foreigners in this material is interesting, we know that narrative and it supports that narrative. Yeah, but it's really important that this science corroborates what we essentially already had evidence for, which is this Roman migration. And we knew that it happened, but to an extent it was also very focused on things like legions moving around and not necessarily the women and the children who moved as well and who moved with them and settled here. And this idea of Britain being quite a diverse area at the time, you know, not everyone came from the same place. And Glyn and I talk a lot about the people who come from within Britain as well, because to us, that might seem like

nothing, you know, moving from Newcastle to Colchester is a big move, but you're not changing countries. But to the Romans, the amount that they would have had to move is huge. Well, there's one particular figure who I'd like to ask about before I start wrapping up. And this is a man, and forgive me if I say it completely wrong, the Mercia man. Who was this person? So the Mercia cremation that you're referring to is a cremation that was obviously found in Mersey and is one of the most elaborate burials that we've got. So this is a person who was put into, I've talked about the different vessel types, and this is a person who was put into a glass vessel inside a lead pot,

and we've talked about those two being some of the most expensive materials that you can get. Their bone was cremated at extremely high temperatures, very well maintained. It's highly fragmented. So there was obviously a lot going on during that funeral. And this is an individual who has been sexed as male. And he is aged to his sort of late 30s early 40s when he died and we actually found evidence that he also had a kind of a spinal condition that would have affected his mobility perhaps quite severely it's hard to tell but this is an interesting thing that the cremation specialist who examined him found that area actually of the spine that is quite visibly different and visibly damaged is burnt a lot less than the rest of him. So actually, she suggested that perhaps he might have even had some

kind of back brace, something that he used on his back that was with him in the cremation. Yeah, I mean, of course, this is something that's so difficult to tell, but it's so visible when you look at the cremation, you know, the rest of the bone looks so different from the ones that have the pathology. They just look far less burnt. And so there might've just been a barrier there. And then the other thing that we have is we've had lipid residue analysis for this individual. And lipid residue analysis is basically where we look at traces of fat residues that stay on the bone and we can actually determine what it is. And it's been determined that it was Boswellia incense that comes from Eastern Africa.

So, you know, the expense of bringing frankincense from East Africa into Britain to be used essentially to put on the bones after the funeral is just amazing. So he is one of the most elaborate, expensive funerals that we have. And he is one of the people that we'll be displaying in the exhibition. I love those connections. You know, that is almost, almost as cool as a lapis lazuli from Tutankhamen's death mask coming from afghanistan and being by the river nile in the second millennium bc that's connections with east africa is insane and it's incredible how going back to the point that you made earlier how we've known about these cremations for years but it's only now thanks to these advances and everything and the work that you guys are doing that we're finding out this incredible information about these figures who otherwise

we would know absolutely nothing about. Well, this Mersey cremation was actually excavated in 1912. How can we only, sort of in the recent archaeological history, be looking at them? It's incredible. The Mersey man is an interesting one because excavated in 1912, so very historic and antiquarian in a sense. And it's only in recent years that academics undertook the study, the lipid residue analysis that revealed this frankincense being applied to the bone, and osteologists at the time could look at it. But of course, under the Decoding the Dead project, we've been able to add another layer. So the fact that the petrous bone survived,

and that's not something we talk about, actually, that you need these bones surviving, you you know if you haven't got a petrous bone so this is the bone in the head near the ear where isotope analysis can be undertaken the sampling can be undertaken you know you can't do it so we're really lucky when these cremations do have these bones that can be used for analysis and under this project we've been able to send that off to the University of Durham and have Mersey Mann analysed. So we're always adding new bits to the puzzle. So I think Mersey Mann's a really good one for showing how different academics have approached this at different points in time with new science. And we're just adding another layer to him. We're just trying to build him more into an individual.

And we call him the Mersey Mann because he was obviously discovered in Mersey, but the isotope analysis actually reveals that he potentially came from Western Germany or Southern Belgium, which is incredible. This is all really interesting. And I think it really affirms how ancient history is still very much alive and kicking, thanks to the archaeology and the new scientific methods and all of that. Guys, talk to me about the connection between your project and the University of Reading. and all of that. Guys, talk to me about the connection between your project and the University of Reading. So this is a collaborative project and actually one of the main remits of this project is to bring in all these different specialists, Roman archaeologists, artefact specialists, osteologists, isotope specialists, and really analyse these cremations from every direction

possible. And the University of Reading is obviously providing a lot of that academic background. Now, Decoding the Dead, this whole project, this exhibition, guys tell me all about it. When does it open and where? How can we go and see it? It opens on the 24th of July, so not long now, at Colchester Museum and it's free after normal admission costs to the castle and it's going to take you on a journey. It's going to take you on a journey. It's going to take you on a journey through the Roman funeral. It's going to help you decode the dead, you know, yourselves. You can see our six case studies

and the work of the osteologists and scientists. And it's going to end with the concept of honouring the dead. You know, it's going to delve into how and why the Romans buried and honoured the dead the way they did. So it's got everything. We've packed it full. And I think what's fantastic is we've also got loans from Colchester Archaeological Trust.

That's material from cremations and burials that's never been publicly displayed before. So we're bringing in a lot of new material, a lot of new science, and we hope it's going to be really engaging for people. And it's just worth saying that we've talked about how for the Romans it was so important to commemorate and honour their ancestors and tell their stories and talk about them, keeping their memory alive.

And essentially this science is the only way that we have of doing the same thing, and that's what this exhibition is doing. It's bringing to light these people who came from colchester and giving what little information we can building up a picture about them as individuals and keeping their memory alive for them absolutely we know how much both of you love your roman stuff so you're very much following in that roman tradition it's fantastic carolina glenn thank you both for coming on the podcast this is awesome thanks for coming on the podcast. This is awesome. Thanks for coming on the show. Thank you very much. Thank you. We'll see you're not. Just workouts and classes to strengthen who you are. So no matter your era, make it your best with Peloton.

Find your push. Find your power. Peloton. Visit Peloton at onepeloton.ca.