New Roman crucifixion evidence found in Britain
Interesting points - the body was brought back and buried.
Posted Dec 8, 2021, 2:31 PM UTC
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It looks like the nail position is similar to Yehoanan. The heel of each foot would have been nailed to either side of the vertical crossbeam rather than the front of the beam. Is that an accurate interpretation of this evidence?
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According to this BBC article, yes!
She found only the Jerusalem example to be a likely crucifixion because the right heel bone retained a nail which was in exactly the same position as the Fenstanton burial.
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Neat, I suspect the Roman's nailed him up and the locals took him down and buried him. Is it sloppy Archaeology not to notice a nail in the heal before bagging the bones?
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It doesn’t seem so. Nails aren’t very commonly found in bones, and this one was protruding only a couple centimeters out of the bone and was caked in mud.
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Perfectly normal; you typically collect the artifacts of a context and don’t end up cleaning the artifact of dirt until you get to the lab.
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No, you actually want to disturb the materials as little as possible in the field. You want to do your cleaning and examination in a laboratory environment--or, more realistically, a covered structure out of the elements.
If you watch a TV program and they hold up something for the camera it is almost always "staged" (as in, cleaned up).
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The Independent article has much more info about the nature of the archaeology and the person(s) discovered. Here are some quotes of interest:
Aged in his late 20s or early 30s, the victim may have been a slave or paid worker in a local industrial complex, probably involved in the manufacture of candles, cosmetics and soap.
Evidence from his left ankle and lower leg and in his right shin reveals that he had experienced abnormal bone growth there, probably caused by rope bonds or metal shackles. It’s possible that his legs were perhaps attached to a wall or other structure. It is likely, therefore, that he had been incarcerated for a period.
Evidence from his grave suggests that his corpse may have been left hanging on the cross for some time before he was buried. Very unusually, he seems to have been interred on a makeshift bier, rather than in a coffin or shroud or with nothing at all.
The Fenstanton crucified man only had his right foot nailed to the cross. The nail had been hammered in horizontally through the back of his ankle and his heel. Only 1-2cm of the nail would actually have penetrated the timber upright of the cross.
Location of discovery:
The skeleton was found along with the remains of 43 other individuals buried in five small Roman cemeteries in Fenstanton. In common with many of those, the crucifixion victim had experienced fractures to his bones. Many of the buried individuals had also suffered from probable malaria. The area was marshy and would have been mosquito-ridden.
Perhaps significantly, the only other individual in the cemetery to have been interred on a bier was the person buried immediately next to him.
It is therefore perhaps conceivable that that second individual – a woman in her late 30s or early 40s – had also been crucified, but that she had been attached to her cross solely with ropes, not nails.
Most mysterious of all is evidence of a series of four massive 50cm diameter freestanding timber posts of unknown function.
Those freestanding timber posts sound like they could be reusable stakes for crucifixion, meaning the victims would have only carried the cross beam and not the whole cross.
Full Independent article here.
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Good catch - annoyingly, neither article covers everything. Unfortunately my BAM subscription has lapsed, so I'll have to pop into WHSmith sometime.
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Yeah, it’s always best to get info directly from the researchers when possible from my experience. Journalists just aren’t able to communicate discoveries with the nuance they require often times.
The final paper is gonna be interesting to read!
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So we have what, two or three heel bones with nails in now?
Could there be something other than crucifixion going on with these few feet we have?
Did the Romans nail people up or tie them up? Nails were really, really expensive, rope was cheap and readily available. Why use them on torturing a miscreant with no need to?
The Roman occupation of Britannia in 43AD was pretty much based wholly on them finding the makings of nails here some considerable time before.
EDIT: A downvote? Really? Not an unreasonable question. Another form of torture, a burial practice, accidents? We've only got two nail in heels and if you were wearing sandals and stood on one, maybe that's explanation enough!
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Nails weren't that expensive and the Romans were doing pretty well for themselves. They could afford a couple nails to make an example of someone. We know they didn't always use nails, especially in mass crucifixions, sometimes they used ropes. But it wasn't uncommon for them to use nails for crucifixion.
Other than crucifixion there would be no known reason for a dead person's foot to have a nail hammered through it. If it was an accident then it wouldn't go horizontally through the ankle and heel. And the person would have removed it before they died.
The Roman occupation of Britannia in 43AD was pretty much based wholly on them finding the makings of nails here some considerable time before.
This sentence is unintelligible to me. Did you mistype something?
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They were probably referring to the fact that the Romans invaded Britain in the first place largely because of their metal ores, especially tin.
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Perhaps, although nails were made of iron, not tin/bronze and the tin mines weren't the reason for the invasion.
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They were one reason. Another reason was for Claudius to try to establish some credibility for himself, but tin was a big deal because you need it to make bronze.
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Did the Romans nail people up or tie them up?
Roman crucifixions did both - the thieves on the cross were roped, Jesus was nailed. It appears to be fairly random as to how and why.
Nails were really, really expensive, rope was cheap and readily available. Why use them on torturing a miscreant with no need to?
This isn't quite true - nails are common enough to be buried (eg the 'hobnail' burials) in Roman Britain up to a point. The early date range for the skeleton fits into that abundance period, but the late date (360) is in the declining period of Iron production in Britain, where output was only about 1/4 of what it was at the beginning of the century. Nails disappear from burials, and coffins weren't even nailed down anymore as they were precious commodity.
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John Granger Cook's Crucifixion in the Mediterranean World (Mohr Siebeck, 2014) is the best repository of knowledge on ancient Roman crucifixion. Here is what he wrote on this topic:
"Ropes or nails (or perhaps both) could be used to fix the criminals to their crosses.45 [footnote 45: Ropes: Plin. Nat. 28.46, Xenophon Eph. 4.2.3 (said to be an Egyptian practice), lex Puteolana II.9 (for binding or flogging), Esther Rabbah 10.5 (ropes and nails), which presumably reflects Roman practice (Chapman, Ancient Jewish and Christian Perceptions, 168-169), the amulet in chapt. 2 § 3.2.3, and the Acta Andreae (below). Nails: chapt. 2 § 3.1.4, 3.4.4, 3.5.5, 3.8.5, 3.24.1, John 21:25, Sen. Dial. 7.19.3, lex Puteolana II.12, Luc. 6.547, Aug. Civ. 19.23 and Lact. Inst. 4.13.11 (oracles describing the bitter death of Jesus), Esther Rabbah 10.5, m. Shabb. 6:10, y. Shabb 6.9 (8c), T-S Arabic 44.44] Plautus’s text above implies that both the hands and feet of the condemned could be nailed to crosses.46 [footnote 46: Tertullian confirms this with his quotation of Ps 21:17 LXX (Marc. 3.19.5): foderunt, inquit, manus meas et pedes, quae propria atrocia sunt crucis (they pierced, he says, my hands and feet, which are the special savageries of the cross).] The remains of Jehoḥanan ben Ḥagqol are archaeological evidence of the nailing of feet to either side of the vertical beam (as in the Puteoli graffito in which both feet are attached to either side of the vertical beam [figures 5-7, 11-13]). The nail found in Jehoḥanan’s right calcaneum was 11.5 cm long. Joseph Zias and Eliezer Sekeles write, in addition, that 'the lack of traumatic injury to the forearm and metacarpals of the hand seems to suggest that the arms of the condemned were tied rather than nailed to the cross.'47 The Pereire gem (figure 14), on the other hand, shows fetters around the arms of the crucified Christ, and the gem was made when the Romans were still practicing crucifixion. The use of ropes receives some confirmation from Xenophon’s romance: ἀναστήσαντες τὸν σταυρὸν προσαρτῶσι, σπάρτοις τὰς χεῖρας σφίγξαντες καὶ τοὺς πόδας· τοῦτο γὰρ τῆς ἀνασταυρώσεως ἔθος τοῖς ἐκεῖ (setting up a cross they suspended him, tightly binding his hands and feet with ropes; this is the custom of those in that place [Egypt]).48 The Acta Andreae, although legendary, probably dates to the second or third century and so may reflect a knowledge of methods of crucifixion: 'When those came [the executioners], they only bound his feet and his arm-pits, not nailing either his hands nor his feet; nor did they cut his knees' " (pp. 425-426).
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Very good news this is.
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It's interesting, but why is it good news?
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There are very few examples of human remains of crucifixion victims (that we know of), I think the only one before this was Yohanan in Jerusalem? Good news because there’s another example to study now.
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Cool! Why do we have so few? I thought the Romans executed people left and right?
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My understanding is that the nails were expensive enough not to leave in their victims and were usually taken out. I may be wrong, but I have heard that
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Because as DuppyDon's post shows there are often skeleton's where it isn't clear that they were crucified. After burial any number of things can damage a skeleton even creating holes. There's no guarantee that any crucifixion victim would be well enough preserved for us to determine they were crucified. If rope was more commonly used than nails, wouldn't we have a hard time showing they were crucified?
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Even if they were (and we do not have anything like records for this) remember this is an empire of perhaps sixty million people.
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I recently read Emma Southon’s A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum, and if I recall correctly, she speculates that most Roman crucifixions involved driving nail’s through bone, and the reason why there isn’t a lot of archeological evidence is because people kept the nails as charms/souvenirs.
Is this well supported?
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No. Nails were expensive and usually people were tied to the cross not nailed.
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Wonder if the guard was distracted by a tryst with a mourning matron
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This seems like a much more conclusive discovery than that other attempt at diagnosing crucifixion from Italy. Fascinating!
Did I miss them stating what they thought the identity of the person was? I saw a possibility about them being a slave and 25-35, dated between 2nd and 4th centuries but not much about their identity?
They said because of "who" they crucified it most likely will never be known as to who they were since there probably is no record of them.
Source for this claim?
I've read the paper discussing the Italy discovery and they had this to say:
They couldn't even radiocarbon date the body (like they did for this new discovery) because the bones were preserved so poorly:
More on preservation:
I agree it was a crucifixion victim based on the calcaneal punctrue alone, and the researchers argue well for that. But that case is not as clear-cut as this new one.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12520-018-0631-9