Dead puppies, potential human sacrifices and a painted dog penis bone buried in a ritual deposit in an ancient quarry shaft in southern England are revealing what fertility rituals may have looked like in the early decades of Roman conquest.
“It was filled with an absolutely shocking number of bones,” says Ellen Green, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading. “You couldn’t move around in there without stepping on something.” Green describes the find in a recent issue of the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
The hole full of bones—the largest ritual deposit discovered of its kind dating to the Roman Britain period—gives archaeologists hints about the ways that conquered British did—and didn’t—adopt the cultural practices of Rome as early as the first century A.D.
Investigating the bone pit
Green and her colleagues were conducting obligatory archaeological surveys in Ewell, a town in Surrey southwest of London, in 2015 before a care home was built. Ewell had a Roman-era settlement that contained a flint and chalk quarry, and archaeologists had guessed there may be remains in the area.
While excavating the area, the team uncovered a shaft 13 feet deep with thousands of bones. The top layer mostly contained the remains of different types of animals that had evidence of human consumption—likely ancient kitchen garbage. But as Green and her colleagues dug deeper, they began to find more and more bones from dogs, horses, pigs, and eventually, humans.
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By Green’s final tally and analysis, the pit contained about 11,400 identifiable bone fragments, which included the parts of at least 21 humans buried in the shaft and at least 282 individual animals.
“There aren’t any sites that have been excavated in Britain that have had something like this, to be honest,” says Green. These bones were deposited from roughly A.D. 77 to about A.D. 118 at the latest, based on a combination of dates found on coins buried with the remains and radiocarbon dating techniques. That’s only a few decades after Rome’s first incursion into Britain in A.D. 43.
Michael Fulford, a Roman period archaeologist at the University of Reading who was not involved in the research, says the find is “remarkable” and praised Green’s “very meticulous study of the remains.”
It’s unclear how these humans and animals died, but Green says that the way they were deposited doesn’t appear like other burials. For example, other than the top layer, where bones appear to be garbage tossed from food, almost none of the bones show any signs of trauma or any other obvious causes of death. The dogs especially all appear to have had healthy bones at the time of death, which may be signs that many were pets rather than strays, she says.
Among the thousands of bones found in the quarry shaft in Ewell, archaeologists found a dog’s baculum or penis bone stained with red ochre on the top surface of the bone.
Photograph Courtesy Ellen Green, 2024/Oxford Journal of Archaeology
While it’s difficult to say for sure what happened to these people and animals, Green can’t rule out the possibility of human sacrifice—slitting the throat was a common method of sacrifice at the time and doesn’t usually leave marks on bones.
Were the bones part of a fertility ritual?
In many cases like this, it’s difficult to say why humans and animals were buried and potentially sacrificed. But the volume and types of remains in this case make Green suspect a fertility ritual.
The human remains are one clue. Twenty of the individuals were buried in parts, and each seemingly in groups of five that included a baby, a child, a teenager and two adults. The adult bones were too fragmented to preserve clear signs that might help estimate their age. But if one of these adults were older, Green says the remains coincide with Roman conceptions of the different stages in life.
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Dogs were the most common of all animals buried, making up about half of all of the animal individuals identified. “This is the largest assemblage of dogs to ever come out of a single feature in Romano-Britain,” Green says.
Some of these were even buried whole, and the remains of one puppy were found in a ceramic jar. Most of the dogs were small—likely lapdogs that Romans sometimes had as pets around this time. “They were at best terriers, ratting dogs,” Green says.
Lapdogs are associated with a whole host of religious figures in Ancient Rome, she notes. Art from this period often depicts lapdogs with mother goddess figures, women with fruit baskets and with baby humans—all fertility symbols.
The most compelling of these remains is a single dog penis bone—“the star of the show”— that may have been painted red with a pigment called ochre. “The Romans loved penises,” Green says. “They were thought to ward off bad luck and the evil eye.”
Many of the remains in the shaft, human or animal, are babies. Particularly interesting are several baby and fetal horses. Unlike dogs or the other domestic animals found in the deposits that give birth throughout the year, horses mostly only give birth in the spring.
Taking all this evidence together and the fact that the deposits also held charred barley, a crop grown in the area, Green believes that whatever happened here might have been related to a springtime fertility ritual. “It probably comes down to agricultural fertility,” Green says.
Fulford isn’t sure whether the ritual was related to fertility—it’s difficult to say at this point. But he is convinced that some sort of ritual occurred, as the deposit matches a pattern of several other deposits found. One in Silchester is only about 30 miles away, for example, and has dogs, ravens and a carved knife handle depicting mating dogs.
Duncan Garrow, an archaeologist at the University of Reading and Green’s Ph.D. supervisor notes that further archaeological work in the surrounding area could reveal more about what people were doing in Ewell and what kinds of rituals they might have been up to.
Was the bone deposit Roman or British?
It’s difficult to say exactly who was doing the sacrificing, if any occurred. Officially, Romans disapproved of human sacrifice, and the practice would have been controversial under their rule, Green says. Some Roman writers believed it was going on before conquest, and may have even used it as an excuse for conquering Britain. But there isn’t a lot of evidence either way as the island didn’t have any written records until after the Roman conquest, and some of the Roman accounts are dubious, Green says.
Chemical signatures in the bones of three of the humans suggest that one grew up very close by, and the others from not too far away; they likely weren’t Roman. “It looks like they are local people that are ending up in there,” Green says.
Garrow notes that aside from being very large, the Ewell bone deposit otherwise appears similar in composition to ritual deposits from Stone Age Britain. “It’s amazing to see deposits like that in Roman Britain,” Garrow says. “It looks strange, but familiarly strange.”
Another odd sign of ritual is the evidence that some of the remains were pulled apart. Some bones show signs of being repeatedly handled at some point, says Green, like they were removed from the rest of the bodies then replaced later. Some parts are missing altogether.
Green sees this as a sign of the way things were operating on two levels in the years following the initial Roman incursions. Whatever rituals were going on here had some Roman characteristics such as the use of lapdogs, or even dog sacrifice, but they also had very non-Roman characteristics, such as messing with bodies after death and potential human sacrifice.
Fulford agrees that the finds represent a crossroads in culture during this period: “It’s another piece of evidence that takes us away from the idea of a Britain that was strongly linked with Roman practices.”