Anglo Saxon Family Reburial I
n the year 2000, Millennium year, the Gillings family sold their orchards at the top of Water Lane to a developer for a small housing estate. Before building commenced, an archaeological survey was carried out by Bedfordshire County Archaeology Service (BCAS) and the area was, as suspected, found to be part of an ancient barrow (or burial site) covering three periods, the oldest dating back to the late Neolithic/ early Bronze Age circa 2000 BC. A licence had to be obtained from the Home Office before excavations could commence. There had been a previous dig near by on the site of the present industrial estate in Back Lane carried out by the Cambridgeshire Archaeological Club in 1951 when Melbourn Whiting Company exposed 28 skeletons during chalk quarrying on the ridge. It was a far more relaxed affair than our Millennium dig, the site was open to any visitors and several people told the History Committee that as schoolchildren they had removed bones and other things from the graves – this time the site was firmly fenced off against intruders! In 1951 it was a ‘rescue’ dig and though the full extent of the cemetery was uncertain it was thought to reveal important evidence for the transition from paganism to Christianity. The graves were all covered up again as it was feared that treasure hunters would come and disturb the site. This new discovery caused great excitement and, in May 2000 a full-scale dig was begun in the course of which 52 graves were revealed containing the bones of 59 individuals. Other researchers in this field visited the BCAS site as the site was considered to be a nationally important source of data. In the past the dating of such burial sites was based on the artefacts found within the graves, but with modern high precision carbon dating processes now available the skeletons could be dated to within one or two generations. This site is thought to have been in use between 575 and 650 AD There were 17 women, 23 men and 10 children amongst the remains (the other bones were too damaged to determine the sex) and one foetus with its mother. They were quite tall, the tallest man being 184cm (6ft) and the tallest woman 171cm (5’ 7”) which suggests they enjoyed good nutrition, but there were also signs of iron deficiency due perhaps to
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Bedfordshire archaeologists working on the Chalkhill Barrow site
the scarcity of red meat or possibly intestinal parasites. Sixty percent of the adults showed signs of arthritis mostly in the spine indicating that working life was hard. The Melbourn people had healthier teeth than most Saxon remains have shown although about a third of them had dental disease! There was evidence of at least two women having grooves in their front teeth, they were probably spinners who pulled the linen thread through their mouths to keep it damp. Although some of the skeletons displayed bone fractures, they were more suggestive of accidents than of violence, which would lead us to think that it was a relatively peaceful, rural community. Many of the burials contained ‘grave goods’ One female skeleton was found wearing a necklace of 69 glass and amber beads, brooches and a buckled girdle with a knife and a spindle whorl attached, she must have been an important figure in the community. There were indications that she was wearing a woollen cloak over a linen garment, which suggests she lived in the latter part of the 6th century. A number of other glass and amber necklaces were found and two spectacular brooches, one was a great square headed brooch dated AD 550–570 which is extremely rare, also a radiate brooch which the Melbourn History Group were able to have copied in silver and 100 of them were made and sold within the village.
The reburial at New Road Cemetery The male skeleton to be interred in the mound appears to have been a strong, robust man with 27 teeth at the time of his death. He would have been around 40 years old and stood about 5ft 10” tall. The female skeleton shows signs of a pregnancy, she was 30/35 years old and 5ft 7”. She suffered from severe osteo-arthritis in her spine and had bad teeth. The child was about 2½ or 3 and would seem to have suffered from anaemia. The child is to be reburied in the arms of the mother to keep each other company as was fairly common in those days. DNA testing is very costly so we do not know whether this ‘family’ was actually related, this can therefore only be a symbolic family burial. They will be wrapped separately in a pure linen shroud and laid on
