![]() On the other, explicit historical records can offer possible explanations for the more baffling types of deviant burial, such as that at Stanwick. On the one hand, archaeologists have shown how far back our fear of the living dead goes. ![]() These burials are vital in showing how history and archaeology can mutually inform one another. Fear of such threats has resulted in many other 'deviant' burials across Europe, in which corpses were effectively scapegoated for a range of problems, from fatal contagion to severe weather. Simon Mays, Historic England’s human skeletal biologist, said in an interview in the Guardian that this mutilation was thought to be unique in Romano-Britain and that ‘The fact that he’s buried face down in the grave is consistent with somebody whose behaviour marked them out as odd or threatening within a community’. Buried face down, the corpse's tongue had been cut out and replaced with a flat stone. ![]() In late January this year news broke of an unusual Roman British skeleton from Stanwick, Northamptonshire. ![]()
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