Vindolanda: unfortunate find

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

I understand that they have identified it as a girl. The original report was the one that was uncertain.

[Vindex]

All good stuff for driving up the visitor figures...

Give the press another couple of days and we'll have another Roman brothel on our hands :roll:

[Gaius Julius Caesar]

Well, there was a rather thriving enterprise at Chester Cavelry Fort after all.....

[Matthew Amt]

Sorry, Matthew, I was the guilty party. It struck me as funny. I'd never seen it on any threads here before. Guess I don't get around enough.

Oh, no, I wasn't about to blast *you*! Only the idiots who point and laugh at perfectly normal ancient habits, judging them by a rather narrow set of *today's* fashions! Why do people like that claim to study history?? (I know, it's about the money, I'm just howling at the sky...)

Matthew

[Occulus]

Hi, after speaking to Trudi (She who did the initial report, and not spelt Trudy as shown in the article), the reason the gender of the body isn't identified yet is due to a lack of evidence. As the age of the child is somewhere between 8 and 10 the pelvis hasn't developed fully yet and so identification is difficult there. The skull has sadly been damaged, either due to damage at death, or when a heavy stone slab was put on top of the body. As the skull of the child is quite thin some of it has rotted.

The body lay hidden below the floor of an early 3rd century barracks block (as in a previously laid floor was lifted up, a hole dug, and the body put in before the stone was relaid) and so we can surmise that whoever put the body there did so because the nature of the death was socially unacceptable.

There was no evidence of clothing found with the body, but the positioning of the hands and arms in front of the child led to the supposition that the arms had been bound together.

Hope this helps