Did headhunters stalk Roman Britain?

Did headhunters stalk Roman Britain? Excavations for London's Crossrail project have unearthed some disturbing clues.  Of all the discoveries an archaeologist could make, this has to be one of the more gruesome. Twenty feet beneath Liverpool Street, in the heart of the City of London, excavators recently uncovered a human skeleton deprived of its head. The skull had been placed between the victim's legs. 

The mysterious remains, which date from the Roman period, were dug up as part of the Crossrail project, a £15 billion scheme to establish a 26-mile rail network across the capital. And they are just one of several grim artefacts that are challenging long-held beliefs about Roman Britain, shedding light on ancient Celtic practices and terrifying Roman customs.

via The Telegraph

The celtic practice of taking heads home as trophies is well known, and the subsequent treatment of them is the source of the 'grail' legends of King Arthur (the christian aspect was added in 1200).

Eh.... I should point out a parallel local phenomena about when I was 12 or 14 here, I used to do a lot of long distant hiking, sometimes more than one day straight. Once in a while, I would come across down by the rail road tracks deer, without evidence of being shot or stabbed, lying back to back, and their necks arching back and heads touching, the inner roof of their mouths and snout somehow teisted.... blood dribbling out of their mouths and anus, but never that much blood. They must of tied being tortured in that absurd, disturbing way, and their bodies dumped, which is odd given you would assume they would be harvested for their flesh (large hunting community here).

People.... there are some very suck people out there. You can't always assume just because a few people are doing something, everyone is involved in it. There was a ritual component to it obviously, but wouldn't bust out the cultural anthropology insights just yet. You may just have evidence of bored, young sick men, or even just a single man doing the Roman version of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

I also recall the fort across the river here.... they recovered decapitated dogs thrown into a trench. No signs of their flesh being eaten.... it was a federal fort, land surveying mission mapping Ohio, and they had plenty of resupply less than three miles away by canoe. Nobody ever figured it out.

We also had a guy farther down river a generation or so afterwards get falsely convicted in place of his father, and was whipped. This drove him insane, and he went on a frontier killing frenzy, and impaled a head on a stake.

Now let's say you took these odd little deer remains, the decapitated head on a spike, and mystery dogs who were decapitated for who knows what reason, and some archeologist looked at this 2000 years ago. Would he be correct in stating there had been this cultural affinity with skull torture and decapitation? Would children's books show people on Sunday drives, lopping heads off of pedestrians as they go by, everyone including the flying head smiling, accepting the situation?

Psychopaths exist today, and likely existed back then. You might just be seeing isolated cases of this. Taiwan and Papua New Guinea had a very sophisticated head hunting culture.... skulls were hoarded in Taiwan especially. We would have a lot more evidence of the Romans doing this, people would of found skull pits or hoards somewhere.

I had a friend who was excavating a Middle Archaic Indian camp in Central Texas years ago (about 5000 years old).

He found the burial of a human skull - no other remains present - with a flint knife between its teeth.

Creepy.

Human beings have always had a strong tendency toward symbolism where death is concerned. Our memorials often proclaim something important about the deceased, be it restrained or very overt, sometimes by the family or perhaps the sentiment of a community. In more feral civilisations, these tendencies dwell more on an animist level, thus cannibals believe that in some way the consumption of an enemy confers a part of his courage or strength, or some similar property. This should not be confused with trophy taking, which is a more direct behaviour pattern, such as a woman in the middle ages who showed the head of her dead husband to her son so he would grow up to wreak revenge, and certainly the lad became a very cruel adult. Roman stroies oten show jubilant mobs parading around with body parts of a fallen leader - there's one instance of an arm where the tendons were pulled to make the hand 'grasp' as some comment on the deceased.

Many of us would not ordinarily think about such practises, partially because we are part of a civilisation that eschews such behaviour, but it's never far away - witness the recent plot to dismember the singer Joss Stone, or the treatment of dead US servicemen in Somalia, for instance. Most of us have psychological brakes that stop us short of murders and atrocities, but at the same time, our mob behaviour can overule that very quickly. Thus an entire crowd of irish wellwishers turn on an army landrover that accidentially approached too closely and beat the hapless soldiers to death. Individually, few of those people would torture or murder howver they hated the victims - together, they feel safe, and when aroused, lose those inhibitions. But this is purely a mechanically social response.

If we look at funeral practises of our distant briotish stone age ancestors, it seems peculiar to us. We see evidence of deliberate defleshing - suggesting cannibalism at first - but something that is designed to speed up mortal decay although we don't know what they did with the perishable leftovers. The bones however were interred without regard to individual unity. They could be mixed up completely, which to us is difficult to understand, so clearly the mindset, religious beliefs, and social structures of any society ccan impact of death rituals quite widely.

When dealing with the Iron Age, we encounter a very brutal civilisation. Warfare iwas endemic, particularly in the earlier part, human sacrifice a required part of prophecy and appeasement, one that was so widespread that a religion almost existed to restrain and control it. Religion had gone from worship of ancestors or the connection between the land and sky, to a more physical desire to control destiny or seek justice for the disasters of fate. It was hugely cruel but on the other hand, the sifting out of people who just didn't fit in by these means, however unfair, meant that socieities were more homogenous.

So it seems to me that the relationship between society and death is a variable one. Human beings are capable of some extreme acts, and we do seem secretly to enjoy hurting others if society says it's acceptable, but our judegment of these acts is usually based on the principles of the modern semi-christian west rather than those of the time and place.

You say it's variable, yet also at the same time you identify a extroverted sensing vs introversion polarity guiding this behavior. Thus, the variability is behaviorally sequential and not random, based on how our brains process group behavior.

I accept the attempt, and won't push too hard here against it, other than asking you to qualify how the timeline of Stoneage to Ironage works in this regard.

Also.... I'm sure you didn't imply it, but your not accusing the Romans or Celts of cannabalistically defleshing people, right? It happens even today, so I wouldn't be surprised if a rare bone pops up that suggests this, but was of the general understanding both Romans and Celts at this point, while still engaging in human sacrifice and in some cults ritualistic mutilation, they didn't eat people.

I know the Aztecs were fond of human sacrifice, but would starve to death prior to eating human flesh. However, Shang and Zhou China both sacrificed humans, and integrated cannibalism into their rites.

Yet, the Chinese overlap the late Paleolithic to bronze age.

How would you integrated these differences into a stable axiomatic axis of sequential diffraction using your cognitive analysis?

All we know of prehistoric Britons within certain time periods is that as part of their dealing with the deceased they deliberately defleshed the dead and interred their bones in barrows. No-one knows what became of the flesh they so stripped - was it spread out to allow nature to reclaim it? Was it buried or burned? Was it consumed either for practical reasons or in soe kind of recycling of the spirit? We just don't know..

Aztec sacrifice was something different. In that, the living heart was pulled from the victim as an offering to the Gods, sometimes specifically, and recent debate has focused upon the idea of a sort of end-timer cult in which the sacrifice was required to appease the Gods and stop them destroying the world.

You say it's variable, yet also at the same time you identify a extroverted sensing vs introversion polarity guiding this behavior. Thus, the variability is behaviorally sequential and not random, based on how our brains process group behavior.

Ahem... Well I'm not concerned with polarity on this issue - whatever that's supposed to mean - but group behaviour in human beings is easy to understand if not always easy to predict. As groups become larger, so the individual becomes less self determinining, dependent more and more on the decisions of dominant members of the group. That's our social instinct and the reason why society functions at all. Most of simply obey because we don't dominate. Of course there are variable attitudes within society since like most things behavioural the 'bell-curve' of responses is always present. The majority more or less comply., the extreme minority might not, but then they tend to suffer for their variance as history and current affairs illustrates regularly.

How large do the groups need to get before this switch occurs? 10 people, 100, 150, 1000, 10,000, etc?

Is it population massed together that encourages this reliance on a few, or is it a corallary that parallels something else?

If I put 10,000 people in say, the Sahara with nothing but the clothes on their back, and 10,000 in say, Cuba..... 2,000 years ago, would the need for commonly recognizing idols/leaders to assert themselves enter into play equally in both lands, or more so in one, or the other? Why wouldn't they just fragment, telling one another off?

Does just massing men together make a political community, a Polis? Are other factors at play here in conjunction with your insights?

The polarity was merely the Jungian Extroversion-Introversion basis to his typology. You seemed to of used it, consciously or not. I'm trying to get a feel for this mechanism you speak of.

How large do the groups need to get before this switch occurs? 10 people, 100, 150, 1000, 10,000, etc?

There's no set size. It's more of a progression. As the group gets larger, less individualism oprevails, because instinctively the group, formal or other casual, willingly falls in line with a charismatic dominant figure very easily. That's why large gigs work - the crowd tend to lose themselves in ther experience of it even though the intimacy of a smaller performance is lost.

[if I put 10,000 people in say, the Sahara with nothing but the clothes on their back, and 10,000 in say, Cuba..... 2,000 years ago, would the need for commonly recognizing idols/leaders to assert themselves enter into play equally in both lands, or more so in one, or the other? Why wouldn't they just fragment, telling one another off?

It depends on whether a leader with sufficient presence and leadership is present. If not, the group fragments, but then it might anyway. Read how Spartacus failed to keep his rabble together. After arguments with two other prominent rebels, Crixus and Oenamus, the three went their seperate ways (all got mauled decisively by Roman forces).

Does just massing men together make a political community, a Polis? Are other factors at play here in conjunction with your insights?

No, of course not. All you have is a large crowd milling around. A community requires some structure and leadership, however it is formed.

The polarity was merely the Jungian Extroversion-Introversion basis to his typology. You seemed to of used it, consciously or not. I'm trying to get a feel for this mechanism you speak of.

I don't really have any interest in this sort of psychobabble. If you want a feel for it, stop linking words together randonmly and look out the window at the world at play.