Extraordinary 1,500-Year-Old Burial Reveals Forbidden Ritual - BBC Timestamp -

Some of the babies were buried inside what were effectively pottery coffins. They smashed open one of these distinctive storage jars that were used for wine or oil and then carefully reassembled it around the body of a tiny child. This storage jar protected all of the fragile bones like the plates of the skull and it's also meant that a lot of the very tiny bones which might otherwise have got lost have all been found even the little tiny bones of the fingers. They've been able to tell when these children died from the pots that they were buried in. They can be dated to around 450 AD from the clay that they were made from and also from their very distinctive shape. In its heyday at the end of the first century BC the villa must have been a splendid dwelling but David Sorin has evidence that it gradually fell into disrepair and around 450 AD the villa for some reason had become the site of a cemetery. It wasn't built on particularly stable ground it was built more on soil than on a solid area and you're going to have some major structural damage. By the middle of the 5th century AD the villa was a crumbling ruin with collapsing walls and cracked mosaic floors. It was in this place of decay that the children were laid to rest. Unlike today ancient Romans very rarely buried their babies in cemeteries. They didn't believe that very young children should be mourned or even given a formal burial. Their bodies were normally just disposed of with very little care or ceremony. Our people do not bring offerings to those children who die in infancy. Our laws forbid us to mourn for infants. It's always hard when you lose a child but you know times were tough. This was not the 21st century. Medicine was primitive at best so the women just kept shucking out kids because that's what you did you know you had to have progeny for whatever reason but there's always grief over the loss of one child I'm sure. Then unexpectedly more bodies were found at the villa. The most surprising thing to me was that in among the babies were animal bones and particularly the bones of dogs and we had to bring in a special forensic expert to deal with these animals. They turned out to be puppies almost every one and they were all five to six months in age. The puppies had been in one case severed in half cut in half and in almost all the other cases beheaded and not just beheaded by being cut but they seem to have been perhaps killed and then had their jaws just ripped apart ripped open. It was very hard to match the heads to the bodies of these animals so there was some kind of ritual going on here. At this late stage of the empire performing pagan rituals was illegal and punishable by death. By 450 AD the Roman emperor and most of his subjects had converted to Christianity but in rural areas many people still continued to worship their pagan gods. Many of them also still believed in witchcraft and black magic and in times of trouble would revert to their old practices. Here at the villa this included the sacrifice of animals like the puppies. They were decapitated as offerings to the gods in the hope of purifying the area and warding off evil. Other animals had been sacrificed. One child was found with the skeleton of a frog considered by many sorcerers to be a cure for fevers. David believed that these outlawed rituals were a sign of the villagers fear.