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Archived News ~ Week ending Friday 30th January 2004.
Osteological analysis of the burial from the ditch of the square barrow (see feature 320) has been completed by Osteologist Malin Holst (see report on this burial and report on other human bone). Analysis of the wear on the man’s teeth and the maturity of bone formation suggest he died during his late thirties to early forties. His bones show evidence for a hard lifestyle in the form of joint disease in his back, slight inflammation of his lower left leg and two fractures of his lower left arm.
The injury to his arm may have initially been caused by a dislocated elbow which would have been extremely painful and may have caused some disability. It is not clear whether the second fracture was caused by an attempt to relocate the dislocated joint. It seems that the injured arm never fully healed and the man favoured his right arm for the rest of his life since the muscles were larger on that side.
As well as this evidence for illness and injury the man had been very active in life, in fact, he may have had a physically gruelling life. Marks on his bones near his hips, arms and shoulders show that the muscles in this part of his body had been well-used, if not subjected to some strain during his life.
In spite of the man having reached adulthood, analysis showed that his teeth were in good condition. There was a lack of calculus (read plaque) and there was little or no sign of periodontal (read gum) disease. Quite what the man had been doing to prevent bad dental health is unclear but the condition of his teeth was nevertheless remarkable.
Unfortunately, the skull of the man had not survived burial well and it was not possible to measure his skull. This makes reconstructing what he may have looked like difficult, but enough of the man’s nasal bones survived to at least say he may have had quite a prominent nose.
The horse tooth that was found with the man may have got into the grave when the ditch of the square barrow was re-cut. Two other burials at Nosterfield also have animal bone included in the grave and so it may be that it was common to include an offering of meat or animal bone in a grave.
The total of burials from Nosterfield Quarry is now fourteen. It includes three inhumations and eleven cremations. Two of the inhumation burials are very unusual. These burials were buried close to the ditch of a probable round barrow. In both cases the bones had been carefully placed and arranged in their burial pits some time after death, long enough for the flesh to have decayed. The two individuals may have been buried soon after death but if so, their bones were relocated sometime later, involving their disinterment and careful rearrangement of their bones in their burial pits. The alternative explanation is that the bodies had been deliberately exposed after death, and once the flesh had perished the bare bones were collected and carefully arranged within the burial pits.
After its initial construction, the ditch of the round barrow was cut by some pits belonging to a pit alignment, although the lapse in time between the two activities is unknown. It was in one of these pits that one individual’s de-fleshed bones had been carefully reburied. We assume that the two disarticulated burials are quite close in date and the burial of one in a later pit alignment suggests they represent continued use of an old burial ground.
A programme of radio-carbon analysis is intended for the burials and until the dates are established it is hard to say more about the burials’ associations. At the moment it seems that the landscape at Nosterfield is used for burial over many generations. We assume that the scattered cremation cemetery associated with two possible round barrows dates to the Bronze Age and that at least one of the square ditches and the disarticulated burials date to the Iron Age.
This is further evidence of the continued use of the landscape at Nosterfield as a place for highly organised land use and activity in prehistory. The landscape at Nosterfield has been used since the late Neolithic as a 'special’ place. It could have been a social meeting place, a central place in the religious belief system, a place for trade and exchange, a place for worship; the reasons behind the use of the henges are open to an enormous amount of debate. By the Early Bronze Age, people were certainly exploiting the area for burial of the dead and this seems to have continued into the Iron Age. This makes the changes wrought by the Romans even more dramatic than has been stated previously (see archived news, 23rd Jan 2004). The landscape features that were almost certainly visible in the Iron Age had been backfilled by the 3rd century AD. The land was no longer part of a 'special’ landscape but was used for settlement and farming by a Romanised community. This is how, for the last 2000 years, the land at Nosterfield has been used, predominantly as farmland with associated nearby settlements, demarcated by ditches, hedges, paths, trackways, water and roads.