The Ancient Murdered Skeleton Found Under Stonehenge

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Mike Pitts is an expert on that period and a Stonehenge specialist. As an archeologist, he's directed his own excavations in the shadow of the stones, but now he's on the trail of a murder mystery at this famous site. As an archeologist working at Stonehenge, like anybody, I spend my time thinking about these magnificent megaliths, but it's strange. Now I turn my back on them and leave the circle and I'm walking out towards Amesbury and the location of this grave. Which is down here. There'd been ancient human bones found at Stonehenge before, but this was different. Cramped into a shallow grave, less than two feet deep. This was the first ever complete skeleton to be recovered from Stonehenge. Stonehenge is unique. Anything buried in the ground at Stonehenge has to have had a special significance and there has to be something very strange and special about the fact that people chose this particular spot to bury this particular man. The skeleton was discovered almost 80 years ago during the largest excavation ever undertaken at Stonehenge. On November the 3rd, 1923, when Lieutenant Colonel William Hawley had been digging on the site for over three years, he made his momentous find. Using a now discredited technique based on race typing through skull shape, the skeleton was cataloged as a British man from the Roman period. It was boxed and stored away at England's Royal College of Surgeons. But in 1941, the college took three direct hits during the Blitz. Archives were almost totally destroyed. The skeletal treasure was lost to archeology before it could be examined by modern science. Then Mike Pitts came on the scene. He found correspondence that he believed located the Stonehenge skeleton in the storerooms of London's Natural History Museum. If he was right, the bones must have been moved before the bombs fell. The skeleton may have survived, but Mike wanted to prove it was the Stonehenge skeleton. So he called in Jackie McKinley, an osteoarchaeologist, an expert on human remains. On examination, distinct features of the skeleton cataloged as 4104 matched those noted by Hawley and confirmed it was the same skeleton. The victim was a healthy male aged about 30. Well, here he is then. He's not a big butch chap. Yeah. I don't think he's done a lot of weightlifting statue wise. Um, but he's shorter than you basically. Yeah. I mean, if you, if you were to compare, that's his, that's the femur. And if we were to compare where you see your, your knees actually considerably higher up now. In fact, he's actually shorter than me. So he's probably about sort of five, five, five-ish. I mean, we can take, we could take measurements on that. But there were also clues about how he had died. The interesting thing that did strike me was in here. These are the neck vertebra. That's what you call the atlas. That's basically what your head sits on to the axis that it pivots on. But down through there, when you get to the fourth one down, it's, um, not quite all there. This is the front of the vertebra, where the, where the vertebral body is. That's where the spinal cord goes. This is the spine that you can feel at the back. And you can see there's a very clean cut that's gone across that part of the vertebra. It's gone right across that, that hole in the middle. So it would have gone through the spinal cord. It would have gone through the spinal cord. So if he wasn't already dead, he would certainly have been dead after that blow. A beheading at Stonehenge thought to be in Roman times. Mike now has a victim and a violent death, but he needs to piece together evidence to uncover how and why this man met his fate. If we take the cut vertebra, which is this one here, the fourth one and the one above it. Now I'm going to try and hold them the right sort of distance apart. And obviously there's a space between them because you've got to remember you've got the, the, um, intervertebral disc in there. So there is a certain amount of space between it's a very thin blade. It looks more like a blade than say something really hefty, like an ax, I suspect. Um, so something more like a sword or a machete. Yeah. A real blade as opposed to a really heavy chop chopping thing basically. And what it's done is gone through the top of that spiny bit and where these two bits would, would articulate and it's cut that off there. Now the fact that it hasn't damaged the vertebral body that's above it, um, suggests that perhaps it didn't go all the way through, that it actually stopped at that stage. But by that point, it had gone through the spinal cord anyway. So quite a wide swinging blow that then was stopped short in the neck. Yeah. Jackie's examination showed the extent of the wound. The weapon had sliced through bone and flesh and though it may not have completely removed the head from the body, the victim would have died instantly. Mike needs to confirm that 4104 did die in Roman times. He calls in English heritage, the guardians of Stonehenge who agreed to radiocarbon date a bone sample, but the chemical analysis will take several weeks until then. Mike has to consider a broad timeframe. We can see from the wound that the man was killed with a very sharp, probably steel blade. We don't have those before, for the sake of argument, let's say 200 BC. It's certainly not contemporary with Stonehenge, uh, which is 4,000 years ago. On the other hand, if he was killed in the historic period, we'd expect to have a written record of that. So we can say for the sake of argument that he died before the Norman conquest before 1066. So we have this broad span of time within which this man might have died and other things being equal. It seems to me the most likely context within that time span is going to be early Roman. The skeletons original cataloging as Roman British was supported by finds of Roman pottery and coins around the grave, which seemed to indicate some kind of activity at Stonehenge during the Roman period. The Romans invaded Britain in AD 43 under the Emperor Claudius. Their occupation lasted nearly 400 years. It was a time of conflict, a time of violent death as the invading legions encountered determined opposition from indigenous British tribes. Tribes such as the warlike Durotrigues and Dubonai to the North and South of Stonehenge clashed frequently with the Romans. Against this background, Mike Pitts identifies three favorite explanations for a beheading at Stonehenge at this time. Evidence of all three lies close by at Cyrencester a key center in Roman Britain. Here there is evidence of decapitation through battle through execution and in funeral rituals. But which of these explains the death at Stonehenge? Contemporary accounts by the Roman writer Tacitus speak of Britain as a complex collection of war painted chanting tribes. Battles were frequent and death was common. So was 410 for the victim of a battle between invading Romans and British tribes? When someone is decapitated in battle, it's usually not a precision strike and it'll come perhaps at a very unusual angle. Um, it, it will be directed perhaps more at the head and neck and the neck just happens to be that entity which catches the main force of the blow. So it's a, it's a much more, um, disorganized event in battle. There's also evident many times there's other evidence in the body for previous injuries, um, injuries that would have perhaps disabled the individual. And then these cranial facial or these head and face and neck injuries are those that were meant to basically extinguish that person's life. So do the remains of 410 for show this evidence of battle? There were no other indications of trauma. Now what this would suggest is that this individual wasn't sort of attacked generally. It wasn't part of a skirmish because you might expect in that case to see other blows, other decapitations that I've seen that obviously from that kind of scenario, there are various other cut marks on the skeleton as well, because people don't in those cases tend to just make one blow. You tend to have a series of blows. So it would suggest you've had one clean blow, which to me suggests more something like an execution or a ritual execution. The absence of other wounds means death in battle seems unlikely. Mike has two other possibilities. One is a ritual performed in some Roman funerals. 5% of skeletons excavated at Roman cemeteries show signs of this ritual beheading, including some found at Cirencester. I think that some of these are probably more sympathetic. Some of these are done from the front. They're done with multiple strokes of a small tool. Usually it looks like a knife of some description and it suggests more an incising motion. When the head is removed, it's actually placed in the grave and out of alignment in an unusual position, usually at the foot end of the burial, either between the shins or the, or the thighs, or maybe at the feet. This kind of act is thought to have been a ritual of care and respect performed on people who otherwise look like ordinary citizens, fit and healthy males or females, both rich and poor. No one is sure why this ritual was performed, but one of many speculations is that it occurred after sudden death. The removal of the head intended to free the body's soul. A key feature of this graveside ritual is the way the head was removed from the front. But this doesn't match the evidence from 4104 where the fatal blow was to the back of the neck. It looks like what's happened is it's come up from this direction into the back of the neck. But that's, that's assuming the person's upright, of course, which at the moment we're not sure about. If the man was standing up straight, then it would be a sweening blow. Somebody's coming up from slightly behind, probably on that, if you, if it's a right-handed person on that side and would go in here. The evidence makes it highly unlikely that a burial ritual was the cause of this man's beheading. Mike is left with one explanation for a Roman beheading at Stonehenge, an execution. If I sat here 18, 1900 years ago, could I have actually seen a beheading? Yes. Public executions almost certainly took place at an amphitheater like the one we have here at Sarncester. And what would have been the occasion of an event like that? Well, probably it would be a judicial execution. That would be the most obvious explanation. Um, a court hearing in the town, the governor's come, trials held, decision execution. And of course we've actually got the skulls here in the cemetery, just a few hundred meters from the amphitheater, which kind of bear out the fact that something like this might've taken place here. Around the time of the Stonehenge beheading, there is written evidence that the Romans publicly executed a local leader in northern France. So was 4104 a leader of importance at the time of Roman occupation? Perhaps even the leader of an indigenous British tribe singled out for execution by the Roman invaders at the unique monument of Stonehenge. Evidence suggests a possible Roman execution at Stonehenge. Confirmation of the time period is expected any day when the radiocarbon dating result comes through. And when he died might explain why he was beheaded at this unique site. What you're trying to do is work out a scenario and what happened in that scenario. Um, so you're having to, it's almost like doing a detective work really. Um, and it's going to be the most, you know, you would work towards most probable cause the same way as somebody does in detective work, except you don't have any witnesses to help you. Even without witnesses, solid forensic evidence can still be assembled. Radiocarbon dating of the man's skeleton will reveal when he lived and died as insurance. Two bone samples were taken for dating rather than just one, which was fortunate as something has gone wrong with the first sample. At each stage of the chemical pretreatment, we do various quality control checks to test that the yields and the isotope ratios and so on are exactly what we would expect. And of the two samples which have been prepared, um, one of them has, has passed all those checks and one of them hasn't. And so I hope that we will get a result assuming that nothing goes wrong at the latest stage to the remaining sample. Mike has a theory that 4104 was an indigenous tribal leader executed by invading Romans. If he's right, the man would have been born in Britain. He needs to prove this. A premolar from the side of the man's jaw is extracted for analysis. Soil and mineral samples from the grave area when matched with information from the tooth will tell him where the man came from. The pit was shorter than the body lying in it. The original excavation diary noting how the body seemed unceremoniously crammed into the narrow scrape. It was less than two feet deep and carved into the chalky soil. This is pretty tough. I guess when they, when they dug the grave all that time ago, it wasn't a pleasant job. Um, they would have been using spades, possibly pickaxes, and they would have hit this stone in the same way that I have. Um, they might've been in a hurry. Who knows? Maybe the man himself had to dig the hole. It was not long enough to take his body and they clearly were in a hurry to get it over with. I suppose it wasn't a pleasant job for anyone. This little container has been specially cleaned in the laboratory so that it is completely uncontaminated. And, uh, I'm going to stick this right into the center of the core of the soil so we can get a clean soil sample. The tooth is being prepared for analysis. Heavily enameled premolars trap information about the person's geographical origins. Teeth are very resilient. They survive very well in the ground. Often in archeological burials, they are the only thing left that survives. And they also, um, because of this, they resist any contamination. So we can be fairly confident that when we analyze the tooth, we're actually getting something that was put there while the individual's alive, rather than something that's been incorporated from the burial from the soil. We analyze the isotope ratios in the teeth, which characterize the tooth. And then we go and find some geology that would actually tie in with that. So we can source them back to a particular type of, of geology where their food was being grown and where their water was being collected. The geology of the United Kingdom is very diverse. It varies over quite small scale, actually. So you can move from one area, let's say on the South Downs up to the Midlands, and you would be living on a completely different geology. And the, the isotope ratios you get from your food and water would be, would be very different. So we can actually track somebody's movement over quite small scales. While the tooth analysis is carried out, Mike gets an important lead. 25 years before he discovered the bones, a now deceased amateur archaeologist named Whiston Peach had located the skeleton and paid for his own private carbon dating. But carbon dating results in Peach's day were much less specific and often unreliable. No records remain of Peach's test result, but a letter has been found at London's Natural History Museum, which might give Mike a lead. Oh, hi Mike. Yep. Good to see you. Yeah, fine. Now I hear you found some letters from Whiston Peach? I have, yeah. Um, not, not a lot I have to say, but amazingly from the seventies, there are, there are a couple of letters. That's more than we had before. Well, that's right. Yeah. It's, it's incredible. I used to keep the stuff filed in these box files and, uh, go through alphabetically. There are a couple of letters here from 25 years ago or so. I recall Whiston Peach coming here. He was a nice old chap, very enthusiastic. And as I recall, his request to us was that there was this skeleton from Stonehenge. He wanted it to be absolutely dated by radiocarbon. And in these letters, clearly he was asking us about the sampling. We permitted him to take a sample for dating at Harwell, which he was prepared to pay for. And they came back with, with a date, which he gives here as a provisional date. So I don't know whether you, the date they got was 760 AD. Well, this is a real tease because on the one hand, it looks like a precise date, but on the other hand, without the details and with this word provisional, it's, it's actually, to me, it's saying, I can't even assume now that the guy was Roman up to this point. I was imagining he was Roman. I think now perhaps I might say he could be Roman or he could be Saxon. Yes. That's opened up the, the townspan even more. Mike had been convinced that his skeleton was the victim of a Roman execution at Stonehenge and expects the radiocarbon dating underway to prove that he is right. But the peach letter means that he now has to consider a later Anglo-Saxon killing as a possibility. As the Romans were leaving Britain in the fifth century, their influence diminished and Britain crumbled. It was the beginning of the dark ages, a time of desolation and confusion. It would be centuries before society was restored. A restoration brought about by the Anglo-Saxons, Germanic settlers who laid the foundations of law and order in the seventh century. But Roman or Anglo-Saxon, the weight of evidence shows the man was executed by a thin, sharp blade. It looks more like a blade than say something really hefty like an axe. The predominant weapon in both periods fits this description. In Saxon times, it was the broadsword. In Roman times, the shorter, lighter gladius. Practical experiments with both may throw up further clues. An experimental archaeologist is there to try and fill in the gaps that can't be answered by any other method. David Sim is a weapons expert, a specialist in swords. If you think about an execution being carried out in the time period where this individual was probably executed, it's going to be probably an execution that was done on the spot. There was no great preparation. And if you want to decapitate somebody and axes aren't the normal part of your equipment, then you're going to use whatever comes to hand. And a sword is going to be the weapon of choice. It depends entirely on the skill of the man who's using the sword. Against an unarmed opponent, you'll take a head off really without too much trouble. The damaged vertebra shows a clean cut, which did not completely sever the man's neck. This may have some bearing on the type of weapon used in the execution. David has assembled an armory for testing, including the Roman gladius and the Saxon broadsword. But this time it's sheep necks that get the job. To test whether it was a sword and not a heavier weapon, David first tries the axe. When you use the axe, you get an enormous amount of energy. It will go straight through a neck. And I felt it would probably cut through two without any trouble at all. From what I know of the characteristics of the wounds we're looking at, it's not the kind of wound that would be produced by an axe. The gladius was the standard weapon of Roman legionaries. Designed primarily as a short one-handed stabbing weapon, could it deliver the cutting power needed to decapitate? The gladius is actually quite an easy weapon to use. And it's quite remarkable that when I struck double-handed blows and then single-handed blows, the amount of penetration was almost the same, which surprised me quite a lot. But certainly, if you couldn't take a head off with a single blow with a gladius, you could cut seven-eighths of the way through. So it could have been the Roman gladius. Longer and heavier, the broadsword was the main weapon of Anglo-Saxon warriors. Well, the broadsword was certainly the easiest to use. Anybody who's reasonably skilled with a sword could take a head off with that without any trouble at all. I think it would be impossible to actually definitively say it came from this period or from that period. You can't make a hard and fast assessment of exactly what weapon was used from what period. If you look at something like the edge that's on a sharpened gladius and the edge that's on a broadsword, they're virtually identical. You can't prove that either of them were the weapon just by looking at the cut that's produced, because it could be either of them. Even if the weapon cannot be determined, Mike still hopes to discover how the beheading took place. A nick on the lower jaw seems to provide a clue. On the underside of the mandible here, there's a tiny little nick, quite a shark. Can you see that? That's basically in here. Right. So it's quite close to the ear. Yeah, it's every corner of the mandible there. If I can just swap fingers round. Okay, I'll bring up the jaw. Right. So tell me where to put this. It'd be roughly there. Which is? Which brings the two cuts onto the same level. The cut to the vertebrae is here and the little nick on the mandible is there. But it's a matter of what the scenario was, whether it happened all in one go. Do you think it could have done? I think I think it could. The combination of wounds suggests two possible positions, either standing upright or kneeling, which would suggest a controlled execution. Do you think the bones can help us actually tell what position the whole body was in? Well, the only way to really do that is test various ways round, because obviously this could have worked in two ways. If you were if somebody was standing upside, if, say, this man was attacked by an assailant from behind and that blow came up and it would come up, as I say, at that angle, hit there. If the person then moved slightly forward, maybe the head moved up slightly to one side because you wouldn't stand still if somebody hit you anyway. You would automatically sort of get some movement. Just the blow would push the body forward. And the fact that I don't think the head could have been down because if the head was down, you would probably have got more damage to the mandible than you had because we're on the level with the mandible. I mean, standing straight, that fourth vertebra is on that level there with the mandible. And I suspect maybe the head's moved up and slightly across, which is why you've just got this nick on one side. Alternatively, of course, if you if the head was down, so you like that and the blows coming in from there, so it's coming in from that side again, you would still have to have the head slightly moved slightly to one side and up just for it to nick on the one side rather than getting more of it. Judicial executions are commonly thought to have been carried out with the victim kneeling, yet Jackie has not discounted a standing decapitation. Mike hopes he can prove his theory of a controlled beheading by assembling a team of experimental and forensic archaeologists to work through all possible scenarios of 4104's death. But from the start, the group challenges Mike's theory that the victim was kneeling with head position forward because of the angle of the wound. There isn't a way, I don't think, that you can produce a wound on this set up that has got the same characteristics as the wound on the existing skeleton. I think if it was in this direction, the blade would come straight down. And what we have is the vertebrae that slice in an angle. So it's most likely that the blade would have to come on an angle. And if you were standing there, you would probably try to get a right angle, which we don't have. But it's most likely, given the position, that it was a single blow that hit the jaw as well. So given that information, the jaw has to be elevated so that it nicks the bottom of the jaw because it's angled. This is not the likely scenario. I think we can conclude that he was definitely, the blow was definitely from behind and the torso was upright or standing. The upward angle of the cut prompts the group to raise the possibility that the victim was standing upright. If he's standing, then the sword blade is coming where? It's coming upwards. Which vertebrae does it cut? It's the fourth vertebrae. So it's cutting there. Just above the spine. Yeah, exactly. So it's got to go through there like that and then catch him and then there. It's possible. It is possible. It's possible. Yeah, it's totally plausible. If this person is running and another person is running behind and you catch a blow. But if the victim was standing, perhaps even moving away from his attacker, then it's possible he wasn't the victim of a controlled killing. After all, Mike's theory hangs in the balance until sword expert David Simm tips the scales back towards execution. I'm not happy that this was done when he was standing, because if he was standing upright, you've got to get your sword up here. Yeah. And you and you you can't get any energy behind. No. I mean, if your hands go above your shoulders, you lose that you've got power in the swing. Your arms and shoulders are in entirely the wrong position to get any energy behind the weapon you're using just because you've got the ideal conditions. Simm also explains why it wasn't a clean cut. You can miss. Yeah. And I think that I think that that's what's happened here. Either with him, if he's kneeling to be executed, then the executioner just delivered a not very good blow. The blow is ill aimed. So Simm argues he was kneeling, but with the head in an upright position. Mike's theory seems vindicated. Catches him there. It goes through his spine. The point then takes that piece of bone out of his jaw that way. I'm convinced. I mean, you have a victim who is kneeling with a straight back. You can't run off. Somebody approaches him from behind quite fast, maybe a step or two forward with a very sharp sword. Yeah. They just mix through instant death. Yes. They take a cut that they mean probably to decapitate him and they miss slightly. So the blade passes through his neck, kills him, takes a bit out of the jaw and his head doesn't actually come off. But it's going to fall. So the whole body would then fall forward. So that would explain why he was buried the way he was buried with the head at a right angle to the rest of the body. And maybe he just fell on his face and they dug a hole just beside where he lay and rubbed him in and kicked him into it. I think this is the way it was done. That the blow comes from. So the forensic evidence points to an execution but cannot determine whether it was Roman or Anglo-Saxon. Mike can't go any further until he gets his date. He's dead before he starts falling forward. I keep thinking what sort of man this was. I like to try and visualize his face. His personality and his dress. But until we have a date, I have to stop myself. Getting too clear in my mind exactly who he was and what he was doing because that is going to profoundly affect the context of the individual. The sort of person he was. Contemporary radiocarbon dating is sophisticated and precise. It will reveal a date pinning the execution at Stonehenge to either a specific period of Roman conflict or Anglo-Saxon order. After months of waiting, Mike is about to find out. Almost a year to the day after Mike Pitts rediscovered the Stonehenge skeleton, he is about to find out when the man was executed. I've got my ideas about what I think this date should be based purely on archaeological judgment. But I admit there is virtually no hard evidence whatsoever. So it's pure intuition. And intuition, of course, goes wrong. So the date is going to be something else. So it's it's kind of it's kind of exciting. And I'm nervous. Mike has two probable scenarios, a Roman period beheading or one from the later Anglo-Saxon period. Everything will be revealed by the result. Hiya. Hi, Mike. How are you doing? Very well. Yourself? All right. A bit nervous. Well, I know you've been waiting for this for some time. So, yeah, I'm not going to show you just yet. These are the results from Oxford of the radiocarbon analysis they've just come through. And the radiocarbon age is 1359 plus or minus 38 BP, which when calibrated gives a date range of a Saxon. Yes, it's right. Cal AD 620 to 770. Right. The Stonehenge killing was an Anglo-Saxon beheading. The Roman theories are discounted as Mike now confronts the later Anglo-Saxon period in more detail. Mike's been given a time span of 150 years, but the date might be even more specific. All living things contain carbon, a proportion of which is radioactive and starts to diminish or decay after death. Carbon dating measures this decay and provides an estimate of when death occurred. But tree rings known to date from single years can also be analysed for radioactive carbon. And when the results from known age tree rings are compared with data from the Stonehenge sample, a probability curve is produced, which points to a much more specific date. We can see from this that the tree rings which match most closely to the radiocarbon date that we've obtained are the ones in the middle of the 7th century. The graph peaks in a very significant period in Anglo-Saxon history around 650 to 690 AD. These 40 years marked a time of great change. A pagan society was being transformed by Christianity. At the same time as the Stonehenge beheading, the use of lavish pagan burial sites like that at Sutton Hoo in East Anglia was being transformed. Once the resting place of kings, they now had a darker purpose. Burial sites for outcasts. Burial sites that the new Christians hoped would damn them to eternity. What really surprised us was the find of some burials which were very plain, just bodies placed in graves, no grave goods. They were buried crouching, kneeling, lying on the back, arms in the air, and the heads, some of the heads were off, some of the heads were by the knees, some of the heads were in the right place but the wrong way round. 39 burials were found at Sutton Hoo, and there was evidence that gallows had once been on the site. The burials were in a ring, and in the middle of the ring were four post sockets. So we thought, huh, what must have happened here is that these people have been killed. It comes in with Christian kings, and they punish them twice. First by killing them, and secondly by burying them in a pagan burial ground. It's as though to say, right, you step out of line, you're not coming in with the new Christian kingdom, we bury you there, we bury you in the pagan burial ground. Until now, experts have had no evidence for Stonehenge being used for anything so late in history. But perhaps its pagan significance gave it a sinister purpose under this new Christian Anglo-Saxon order. The position of this burial and the treatment of the corpse clearly indicates this is an outcast. It's a person that is being basically taken away from society and buried in a place outside of society's limits. So we're seeing, first of all, a clear image that Stonehenge has become associated with fearful and superstitious ideas, a place where a deviant can be executed and buried. And it would say about the person that they have actually, they have been a wrongdoer of some sort, and potentially of some significance as well. So what had 4104 done to justify an execution at Stonehenge in late 7th century England? Change at this time was not just about religion. It was the beginning of land ownership on a grand scale. And with this came the law codes, detailing the first laws of this emerging nation, protecting ownership and punishing wrongdoers. The law codes describe a range of offences and what you've got to do to kind of make up for what you've done in incredible detail. For example, the earliest Kentish laws of about 600 give you the penalty if you're walking along the street with a spear over your shoulder and you poke the fellow behind you in the eye with your spear, then there's a set payment for it. I mean, similarly, if you punch somebody and knock the teeth out, there's a set payment for that. Power was evolving from a patchwork of tribal chiefdoms. Boundaries were being established, often marked by dominant features in the landscape, like Stonehenge. 7th century England was divided into seven kingdoms. Wessex, which contained Stonehenge, was among them. Every kingdom was further broken down into districts, known as hundreds, each of which was locally governed and controlled. We're effectively walking along the northern boundary of what was known as the Hundred of Swanborough in the late Anglo-Saxon period. We know this largely through the evidence of Doomsday Book, which lists the estates. It was the dawn of kingship, and these new kings needed a clear way of warning others to respect their territory and power. Kings need new forms through which to express their power and authority. They can't be everywhere at once. So the use of gallows or the display of an executed criminal, it's a permanent and lasting display of your authority. You may be on the other side of the kingdom, but a rotting corpse or a mouldering head stuck on a stake, it sends a powerful message. So, at this point in the Wessex document, it tells us there used to be gallows here. Absolutely. And the terminology they used, this point is described as the weir hrud, which is basically an old English term or two old English words, and they basically mean the wrongdoers' cross or gallows. It would have been a very evocative image, I think, to people passing by, because we know, for example, that there were important routes of communication both to the north and south of here, and the gallows would have been intervisible with those routes. What would the gallows have actually looked like? What would you have seen if we'd come up here a few centuries ago? Well, you would have had double post gallows, very much unlike the post-medieval single post gallows in the late Anglo-Saxon period. You have two substantial posts set into the ground, and an individual hanging sometimes... With a post across the top? A beam across the top. So, in fact, very much like the stones at Stonehenge. So it's quite a frightening sort of remote but dramatic physical representation of the lore, if you like. Absolutely. Bodies were often left for a considerable length of time hanging from gallows, and we know this, of course, because when the corpses are eventually buried, we often find them with the lower limbs missing, with the lower arms missing, so presumably they've been hanging as a form, of course, of a public display of a corpse for some considerable time. There are a number of excavated cemeteries in very similar locations to this, and the standard layout for these would be to find corpses buried, often very shallowly, just below the turf, as criminals, of course, being at the very bottom end of the social scale, banished, outcast from society. Of course, you invest the minimum amount of labour when you bury them. And that's what we see, I suppose, at our grave at Stonehenge. Indeed, and very shallow graves, and very short graves in many instances, body cramped and crushed into the hole. So it looks like Mike Pitt's murder at Stonehenge was the execution of a wrongdoer. When Mike believed he was looking at a Roman killing, he'd called for a tooth analysis to prove the man was a Briton. That same analysis could now show if, in Anglo-Saxon times, the criminal was a local man who perhaps offended against his own community. This map summarises the strontium and oxygen data that we can refer to in interpreting the data from the teeth. The red contours here are contours of oxygen-drinking water composition across Britain. The tooth that we analysed had a value of minus 7.4, which places it within this broad tract in the centre of Britain. However, if you look at the strontium composition of the tooth, which is going to reflect the person's diet, the water he drinks, the food he eats, that's related to the underlying soil and geology. And using that, we can restrict his likely childhood much more closely. He had a very low value for strontium. The low values that we get in this country come from south-east England, predominantly. And in fact, from the area that's given in the yellow. So from the strontium alone, he could have lived in this area here or here. And if you then combine the oxygen and the strontium, the only areas where they overlap in Britain are in this area here. So that's suggesting quite strongly that the man is fairly local, that he comes from somewhere within south-east England or near the south coast. And in fact, Stonehenge itself is actually inside that yellow zone. So 4104 was probably a local wrongdoer. But what crime had he committed that could lead to his execution at Stonehenge? Crimes and their punishments were being defined and written down for the first time in English history. But in this bloody period, theft of property was judged to be one of the worst offences. For the vast majority of offences committed throughout the Anglo-Saxon period, these could be atoned for, or were atoned for, by the payment of fines. And in fact, capital punishment itself was very rarely enacted. The usual explanation for beheading is the fact that a great fear or superstition perhaps surrounded the particular individual. And the general explanation runs to the effect that a beheaded person wouldn't be able to rise from the dead. So it's fear of the dead rising that's the general explanation for beheaded individuals. There were very few offences for which this could be undertaken. Decapitation in particular was undertaken for theft. And we should really, I think, see this as theft on a grand scale. In particular, cattle rustling and the theft of movable wealth and personal property. All that remains is for Mike to see who this man was. It's not too easy to see on this background. The Stonehenge skull was so badly damaged that computer-generated imaging is needed to rebuild the dead man's face. Finally pinning down the death of this man has transformed the way I think about Stonehenge. From the excavations at Stonehenge, there's absolutely no evidence that anything was happening here in the 7th century. So the discovery of this event at that time suddenly tells us that something was happening here, that people were thinking about Stonehenge, and that's a huge discovery. A public demonstration of power and punishment. Perhaps one of the first examples of its kind under a burgeoning system of law and order that still survives today. A local man, an outcast, maybe a notorious thief. He would have been taken to this fearful place for trial and execution. This is somebody who had profoundly upset society and the community that knew him. He'd done something at a time when our very world was being shaped, our language, our laws, our landscape. He'd done something to upset people and he paid for it and ended his days in the centre of what even today is an icon of our indigenous past. When they get here with the man, who knows? Maybe he struggled, maybe he was already in such fear himself, he'd given himself up to what was about to happen. Whatever the man's crime, it was thought so serious by the community who tried him that they wanted his punishment to continue after death. Banished from the new Christian burial grounds, his body was to be left to rot in a pagan wasteland where they thought his soul would be damned for eternity.