Roman Era Horse Sacrifice?

Some interesting finds are being uncovered during excavations for roadwork in Great Britain.

From the Times of Malta.
Thursday, 26th August 2010

Ice Age and Roman remains surface in Nottinghamshire
Archaeological remains dating back to the last Ice Age together with Iron Age and Roman settlements have been uncovered as part of a Highways Agency scheme to upgrade the A46 between Newark and Widmerpool in Nottinghamshire.

The finds included flint tools and flint knapping debris that date back to about 11,000 BC – around the end of the last Ice Age, when Stone Age hunter-gatherers returned as the climate began to warm up.

Geoff Bethel, A46 Highways Agency project manager, said that as the A46 follows the route of the old Roman road, they expected to uncover a number of artefacts from Roman Britain but finding such rare flint tools dating back to the end of the Ice Age was very exciting.

Mr Bethel added, “We worked very closely with English Heritage, our contractor and the archaeology teams to make sure the road route design avoided the important areas of archaeology during construction.”

The design for the A46 route ensured that the majority of the site of the Roman town of Margi­dunum, near Bingham, was avoided by the new road scheme.

The excavations also provided valuable insight into the Iron Age and Roman communities that used to live in the area. Evidence of an Iron Age settlement at Owthorpe Junction, just east of Cotgrave, was uncovered. Further north at Stragglethorpe junction, a 4,000 year old Neolithic circular monument was located, with eight Bronze Age burials.

Remains of a horse recovered from the site of the newly discovered Roman industrial area.
The horse may have been a ritual sacrifice to bring good luck to the building built over the top,
a practice known from the Roman world. Photo: Highways Agency/PA Wire

The archaeological team uncovered part of the settlement that lined the road leading into the town. Finds included Roman timber buildings, rubbish pits, wells and track ways, as well as a number of burials, all dating back around two thousand years.

Phil Harding, Stone Age expert and presenter of Channel 4’s Time Team, worked on the excavations as a field archaeologist for Cotswold Wessex Archaeology. He said:

“Among the findings was a piece from a Neolithic axe made of greenstone, a type of stone from the Lake District. It was very distinctive, only a chip the size of a stamp, but exciting nonetheless. The stone was very good quality and very distinctive – you could tell a person’s wealth or status by the number of axes he owned, or the flint it was made from.

“Overall, there were enough bits and pieces to suggest we have evidence of hunting people, gathering, camping, and visiting the confluence of two rivers right through to the time of the first farmers.”

Neil Macnab, of Scott Wilson Ltd, principal archaeologist for the contractor Balfour Beatty, said:

“The exciting discovery was of the flint tools and tiny fragments of flint knapping debris, which show very primitive activity occurring in an open area by hunter gathers. To find this in an open area, rather than in a cave is what is unusual, and could mean that they stopped to make something while out on the move.”

Now Truly Fried...

Egoddess - the dew point is 75 - where am I living, the Equator? The "ambient" air temperature was 87 when I left the office at 5 p.m. I gasped my way to the bus stop (1 and 1/2 blocks away, crawling the last 25 feet) - it started to rain on my left side, while the sun was beating upon my back from the west. The bus arrived 3 minutes late; the bus driver, my "regular", instantly assessed my half-conscious condition and made the bus "kneel" so I could stagger on to it... Headed southwest for the next 50 minutes, when I regained consciousness I observed the black storm clouds speeding to the east/northeast, headed toward Lake Michigan, and clear skies speeding up from the ridge at the county line (124th Street) in the west. When I got off the bus, much refreshed from the 55 degree air conditioning and wiping a melting icicle off my nose, I headed south into a freshening wind from the west/southwest. I believe the dew point dropped about 2.5 degrees. After I settled in home, I cleaned up the patio from the earlier storm's detritrius, and settled in for an hour. Now it's 7:29 p.m. and I've got a Johnny Cash special on PBS (they're trying to sell me a CD) - it's quite good, a conpendium of all the top level stars he had on his t.v. sh0w way back when - amazing, just amazing - watching Neil Young and Joni Mitchell, for instance, when they had no wrinkles. Goddess, were we ever all that young? Hmmm, and now I seem to have forgotten the point about doing this particular blog entry - oh, and Carl Perkins (not particularly a fan) is on the t.v. (Johnny Cash Show) right now looking only 50 when everyone knows he's now 213 - and I have to admit, he sure could pick the electric GEE-TAR with a white twisted cord trailing on behind his behind, like a super-long piggy's tail. Oh, and the great pedophile Jerry Lee Lewis, looking all about 40 or so, doing the sqeezy-easy on the piano seat... Okay - enough of that! Ah - now I remember - I wanted to post this, about horse sacrifice. It's a good beginner's primer, even if it was put together by fans of the Theophilosophical Society... Ohmygoddess - now Derrick and the Dominoes are on!!!!! Wait a minute - something is wrong...Derrick is singing a country-western song... IT'S A POD PERSON - RUN, RUN FOR YOUR LIVES... BTW, that primer was written about a late 1890's expedition to northwest Asia, a study of the Buriat peoples - complete with some photographs of the horse-killing portion of the ancient horse sacrifice ritual they practiced. Not for the weak of stomach.