Accoording to the Independent: “When I turned her face to the light, I felt like she was looking at me; I couldn’t hold back my tears. Holding her head in my hands was one of the greatest privileges of my life,” said television presenter Sandi Toksvig, acc.
Toksvig and Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell encountered the face-down burial of a girl aged about 15 to 17 while filming at an Iron Age settlement near Winterborne Kingston, Dorset. The teenager lay prone in a disused pit without jewelry or other grave goods, and the position of her bones suggested her wrists had been bound in front of her body.
Radiocarbon dating placed the interment in the early to mid-first century BCE, around a century before Roman forces reached southern Britain. The settlement belonged to the Durotriges, a Celtic tribe noted for well-planned farmsteads and hillforts.
Russell said, “The context has the sense of a body thrown into a pit, with hands potentially tied at the wrist in front of her body,” according to Live Science. Preliminary examination showed marks on the arms and upper torso that may indicate violence before death.
Two other prone burials have been uncovered in neighboring pits: a teenage girl recovered in 2024 and a young adult woman found in 2010 with a slashed neck. Researchers suspect that all three women were killed as ritual offerings during times of crisis to appease deities or restore social order.
DNA work from nearby cemeteries revealed a matrilineal community in which women held land and men married into households from other regions of Britain and northwest Europe. “DNA evidence even allows tribal lineages to be traced back to a single woman,” said Russell, who co-directs the Durotriges Project.
Excavators also recovered domestic buildings, everyday tools, and Roman-style pottery, evidence of contact with the Mediterranean world soon before the conquest. Russell suggested that sacrificial victims were likely drawn from the least protected levels of society or from outside the kin group.
The team plans full DNA and isotope analyses of all three skeletons to confirm sex, assess trauma and disease, reconstruct diet, and establish whether the girls grew up locally or migrated from farther afield.
Produced with the assistance of a news-analysis system.