Secrets of the Dead

-In the Fenlands of Eastern England, archaeologists uncover the ancient remains of 48 people.

-It was just an ordinary field in Cambridgeshire.

-Hidden among the graves is one particularly incredible find.

-We've got an individual with a nail through his heel.

-We started to realize that this really was something special.

-The best-preserved example of Roman crucifixion ever unearthed.

-This is a diamond find, so to speak.

-Who was this person?

How did they live?

And why were they put to death in such a horrific way?

-It's such a brutal form of execution that it's just almost impossible to imagine.

-Using cutting-edge techniques, a portrait of Roman Britain emerges.

-Presumably you've never seen anything like this before.

-Never.

-What kind of world did they inhabit?

-People died.

They were enslaved.

The Roman conquest was bloody and violent.

-How brutal was it?

-The way these nails are inserted does not suggest that you had a body on the cross in the position of the standard crucifix.

-And in a world-first, the face of a victim of Roman crucifixion is revealed.

-This is by far the most interesting skull that I've ever worked on in my career.

-With each discovery and artifact, scientists and researchers get closer to understanding... O0 C1 -Working at Albion Archaeology, we have the fortune -- or although it doesn't always feel like that -- of working in a fantastic Grade I listed church.

Dates back to the late Anglo-Saxon period.

It's a beautiful building to work in.

It's freezing-cold in the winter and too hot in the summer.

And the electricity, I think, was put in by Thomas Edison maybe back in the 19th century.

But it has character.

A lot of people come in here and don't realize it actually is an office.

They think it's some sort of storeroom, a warehouse, or junk shop possibly.

-But you can build a fort with the boxes.

-True.

-[ Laughs ] -Within this centuries-old church in the east of England, there are thousands of archaeological treasures.

-We're a commercial archaeology company, which means that we work where there's going to be development.

-Albion Archaeology excavates sites of potential archaeological interest before developers are allowed to build on the land.

They have rescued countless items from thousands of years of British history.

But one job stands out -- the unearthing of a gruesome 3rd-century mystery... and one of the rarest discoveries of all time.

-At the time of the Fenstanton dig, I was the site supervisor, which means I'm coordinating the digging on site.

-Fenstanton lies northwest of Cambridge, near an old Roman road named the Via Devana.

In 2016, Albion Archaeology was hired to inspect a patch of land to the south of the village.

-There was a housebuilding company that wanted to put up 85 new houses on the site.

It was just an ordinary field in Cambridgeshire.

Nothing special about it at all.

And it was only teasing out the story through the excavation that we started to realize that this really was something special.

-Over two years of digging, the team found a staggering amount of Roman pottery, small personal items, and jewelry -- evidence of a significant Roman roadside settlement.

And among the treasure trove of Roman artifacts, they found the people who left them behind.

-You suddenly see these patches in the soil.

That's when you start to think, "Well, maybe we've got some human remains here."

-On the edges of the settlement, five separate cemeteries were discovered, containing the remains of 48 people.

-Every skeleton is drawn, measured, located.

They are all given individual numbers within the grave.

-Of the 48, one set of remains held a secret that was only discovered once analysis began back at the lab.

Skeleton 4926.

-To be honest, on site, there was really nothing to say it was any different from any of the others.

-He was buried alongside five other individuals.

It was just an ordinary grave.

-Upon closer inspection, Skeleton 4926 had one very distinctive feature.

-We left it in the lab for a couple of days, and then the person who was washing the bones at the time suddenly noticed something slightly unusual -- a nail through the heel bone.

It went a bit quiet at that point.

People were asking each other, "Have you seen anything like this before?

Have you heard of anything like this before?"

Silence.

Sort of joking almost.

"Oh, it must mean he's been crucified."

We looked up online crucifixions, archaeological evidence.

We all assumed that there must be lots of evidence for that because it's so well-known through history, art, religion, literature.

And we drew up one example from Israel from the 1960s, and that was it, at which point we started to realize the significance of what we'd got.

-A skeleton from Roman Britain discovered with a nail through its right heel bone.

If this person really was crucified, it would be one of the most significant archaeological finds in history.

To try and solve the case, the team gets some expert help.

-We are in my lab, my tiny lab, in Cambridge.

-Dr. Corinne Duhig teaches at the University of Cambridge and is an expert in osteoarchaeology.

-We can call ourselves osteoarchaeologists or bioarchaeologists, but it all means the same thing, which is that we are examining human remains to record them and tell their stories.

And for 15 years, I worked with the police doing investigations into crime scenes or potential crime scenes.

-Whether it's a forensic or an archaeological investigation, Corinne unravels mysteries by studying bones.

-So, Albion Archaeology called me up, and there was this slightly wobbly voice on the other end, saying, "We've got an individual with a nail through his heel."

And there was a kind of pause while we both registered that.

And then, "Could it possibly be a crucifixion?"

Now, I'm very skeptical, and my immediate reaction to anything that's dramatic like that is to say, "No, no.

It probably isn't."

We've got one instance only in the whole world of a definite crucified individual.

This is in Israel.

And that is because the nail became anchored into the bone because it curled, it bent as it was going in.

So to have something like this appear with a nail in position on the body, if it were a crucifixion, it would be the second only that we know in the world.

It would be the first in Britain.

-Corinne searches for another explanation for the nail through the heel bone.

There is evidence that some cultures nailed down the deceased to prevent their spirit from wandering.

-But when we examine the literature from the Roman period, we never find this kind of example of a foot bone actually being pierced in order to stop that spirit from moving about.

-She also wonders if the nail could have been accidentally hammered into the bone, while a coffin was being built around the corpse.

-It's a bit unlikely, isn't it?

Because you would think, if you put nails through it, you would surely stop if you met the bone.

-But only one explanation makes sense.

-I'm beginning to get the awful thought that it could well be a real crucifixion.

-Crucifixion was a punishment that the Romans developed.

It's a suspension punishment in which a person is suspended on a vertical post or a post that has a vertical and a horizontal component.

-The crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth is undoubtedly the best-known example of Roman crucifixion, but this brutal punishment was used for hundreds of years before Christ's execution and continued for hundreds of years after.

-I think the first reliable references occur in Roman sources at the end of the 3rd century BC, and this brutal punishment was still being used all the way till 300 AD.

That's 500 years of brutality.

-Crucifixion was mostly used against those deemed lowest in society -- like slaves and traitors to the state.

It was meant to degrade the victims and serve as a warning to others.

-A passage mentions crucifying bandits on a crossroads so that people would see that and be warned against banditry and robbery.

I think it was also used against slaves to warn them off of slave rebellions.

During the Spartacus Revolt, the sources say that thousands of people were crucified along the Appian Way into Rome.

According to the Jewish historian Josephus, the Roman general Titus was crucifying as many as 500 people a day outside the gates of Jerusalem.

So you start adding up these numbers, it sounds like an awful lot.

-Despite being widely used, crucifixion is rarely mentioned in Roman sources.

-The Romans were reluctant to discuss crucifixion.

Cicero says even the word "cross" should be far from a citizen's ear.

Gospel accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus are the most detailed account of any crucifixion in the Roman world, but it's also a bit frustrating because they don't tell a whole lot.

-Even rarer than written evidence is physical evidence.

Only one confirmed crucifixion case, also with a nail through a bone, has ever been found.

-If they did crucify at least 100,000 people or more -- and I'm convinced that they did -- then where are all those nails?

-One explanation could be that victims were more often simply tied to the cross using ropes.

And if nails were used -- either to secure the body or to inflict greater pain -- it seems Romans didn't let them go to waste after the victim was dead.

-They simply removed the nails and used them for other purposes -- for other crucifixions or to build a house.

-Uncovering a nail still in the heel bone of a crucifixion victim from Roman Britain is a truly remarkable discovery.

And there is something else that makes 4926 not just special, but one of a kind.

-One of the wonderful aspects of this discovery is that you have a complete skeleton.

This is a diamond find, so to speak.

-With the best-preserved example of Roman crucifixion ever uncovered, it's possible to analyze not only this person's death, but also their life.

Who were they?

Where were they from?

Rich or poor?

Slave or free?

And why did they meet such a brutal end?

In order to answer these questions, Corinne is taking Skeleton 4926 for a very thorough analysis... -Go, and we tuck him in there.

-...a state-of-the-art CT scan.

-Try 1-4-8.

[ Beeping ] -My name is Alan.

I'm the imaging manager here at the Spire Cambridge Lea Hospital.

-And I'm Iacopo.

I'm one of the radiographers at Spire Cambridge Lea Hospital.

-Normally speaking, we scan patients that are alive and can talk back to you.

-Take a breath in.

-Or don't.

[ Beeping ] -But this is something that I thought was going to be interesting for me and my colleagues to do.

-This type of scanning enables Corinne to study the remains in more detail than ever before.

-There is the nail going back into the nail hole.

Yeah, that's a good spot.

It's a nice logical division, isn't it?

Okay.

Right.

-So, can we start that?

-Start that.

Okay.

-We take some pictures with an advanced machine which still uses X-rays technology, but we take so many X-rays that we should be able to see axial slices of it.

Instead of just a flat picture, we can take some 3-D volumes and then do all sorts of cool stuff with them.

-The image quality that we got today was superb.

We've created some great images for the scientists to have a look at and try and dig a bit deeper into who this person was and what actually happened to them.

-The scans are handed over to digital imaging company Interspectral, which uses them to create a 3-D virtual model of 4926.

Now Corinne can perform a groundbreaking virtual autopsy, and an old friend is helping her out.

-I first met Corinne when I was an undergraduate, over 20 years ago now.

And I still remember the first time we met.

-Ben Garrod is now a professor of biology and an expert in anatomy.

He credits his former lecturer Corinne with first inspiring him.

-Corinne helped me understand that the study of bones has a really strong and integral place within the study of science.

It's great to come together again to look at what can only be described as a very important discovery.

And having a set of remains like this can give us a snapshot in time, showing us what his or maybe her life was like and ultimately how that life ended.

-Ben and Corinne begin by looking at the basics -- the biological sex and age of 4926.

But when dealing with a centuries-old skeleton, nothing is straightforward.

-I think the big question for me, first of all, is, male or female?

And it's not always easy.

-It's not always easy.

We've got to do it by lots of different features around the body.

And we're looking primarily at the pelvis because that's primary sexual dimorphism.

In other words, that's what changes at puberty.

So, this area here, this is called the sciatic notch, because this is where the sciatic nerve passes through.

In a male, it will stay in that narrow form, as you would find in a child.

But in the female, it grows at puberty.

It opens out to make the pelvis bigger.

-I remember you teaching me years ago.

There's something to do with the actual angle, and you can measure it against your fingers as a very loose estimation.

If it's a certain angle, it's male.

If it's slightly bigger, it's female.

-In females, the angle will be more than 90 degrees and can be very, very large indeed.

What we're seeing here is a little bit smaller than a right angle.

Only just a bit smaller.

-Hm.

-It is slightly more in the male area of his pelvis.

-Okay.

-So that's a good start for us.

-But that's not the whole picture, as you say.

The skull is very important for helping determine male or female.

-So, first of all, let's look at his frontal bone, immediately above the root of the nose.

And you can see that you've got this heavy bulge on the frontal bone, so this is the real sort of Arnold Schwarzenegger brow ridge.

-So I would typically have a brow ridge, being a big, dominant, strapping...male.

-Dominant primate.

[ Laughter ] -And you wouldn't typically see one as accentuated or even present in yourself, for example.

-Yeah, that's absolutely true.

And, in fact, I have no brow ridge, having seen my own X-rays.

-You've said male a few times.

Are you confident this is a man?

-Absolutely confident.

He's coming out as male or probably male in every one of the features that we can score.

-Corinne and Ben are confident 4926 was male.

But can they determine how old he was?

-Can we tell approximately how old this person was when he died?

-All his bones have stopped growing and are fused together.

So we say he is "skeletally adult."

-Mm-hmm.

-So, from then on, everything that we look at is about deterioration.

-[ Chuckles ] I can see, I think, some signs of wear and tear around his lower back here.

-So, you can see it very, very well in this image here.

So, these little nodules here.

This backside of the vertebra should be smooth.

When we get past about 35 years old, we start getting these little nodules developing.

Because the discs are deteriorating, and it prompts this bone growth.

In this case, this guy has got just a little bit of this new bone growth.

So we're saying he's over 35.

Narrow it down, he's probably 35 to 40-ish.

-Skeleton 4926 was a male, aged mid-to-late-thirties at the time of death.

But there are more complex questions still to answer.

Where was he from?

When and how did he live?

Radiocarbon dating of the remains provides a range of time when 4926 lived and died.

Taking the midpoint of that range and cross-referencing it with artifacts found on the site suggests he most likely lived sometime around 250 CE.

What was life like in 3rd-century Roman Britain?

By the turn of the millennium, Rome had evolved from a republic into an empire.

It controlled the entire Mediterranean, in some places for centuries.

It was the unquestioned state power of its day.

But Britain remained unconquered until the early 1st century.

-Britain in terms of the wider Roman Empire is, of course, at the border.

-In the Mediterranean mind-set, Britain is a distant, barbarous wild land.

-We get a sense that Britain is something that is difficult to encounter because the channel is conceptualized as an ocean.

-The ocean is the limit of the known world.

To go beyond the ocean is to expand the limits of empire beyond the known world.

-The people of Britain had been in contact with the Mediterranean world for centuries, trading with the Carthaginians, Greeks, and Romans.

But they only came under Roman rule in 43 CE.

-Britain is conquered because Claudius needs military prestige.

-So, for an emperor like Claudius to do that is a powerful part of how you frame yourself as an emperor.

-Before the Roman invasion, Britons were still living in the Iron Age.

Most of the indigenous population lived in tribes, in simple homes, surviving off the land.

But Roman rule brought changes.

-It became a province of the Roman Empire with towns and temples and forts and industry and all the rest of it, a province in which indigenous and Roman operated side by side, not always comfortably.

But as the period progresses, you see different elements become more and more important.

So there are large numbers of Britons who serve in the Roman army on the Rhine and the Danube.

-The Romans ruled over Britain for more than 350 years, and remnants of their occupation can still be found throughout the land.

4926 lived during the later Roman period, but what was his place in this world?

Was he a wealthy, invading Roman... or a poor, lowly worker native to Britain?

Corinne and Ben want to establish this man's origins and his social status.

-We're talking about a time when people were working on the land, people had a much more physically demanding lifestyle.

-We know people of the area of the time must have been working hard, if only on agricultural work.

-Looking at 4926's limbs, Corinne and Ben can see some signs of physical exertion and, analyzing his skull, evidence of both tooth loss and painful infections throughout his life.

This is typical of all the skeletons uncovered at Fenstanton.

The bones also showed high levels of physical injury, arthritis, and disease.

-They were showing some signs of environmental stress, which might have been iron deficiency anemia or it might have been possibly malaria.

-All of this implies that 4926 and his peers were poor, lower-class workers.

What was this community at Fenstanton like?

Was it made up of locals?

Or were workers shipped in from other parts of the empire?

To solve this mystery, analysis of ancient DNA will provide the clues.

-My name is Dr. Christiana Scheib.

I am a research fellow at the University of Cambridge.

I study ancient human DNA, so particularly people from the medieval ages, but also looking at the Roman period, the Bronze Age, Neolithic.

-As a leading expert in the study of ancient DNA, Christiana Scheib is the perfect person to analyze the population uncovered at Fenstanton.

She tests 20 individuals from the site.

But when dealing with ancient bones, there's little room for error.

-With ancient DNA, you have this timestamped window into the past.

However, it comes with caveats.

Over time, DNA degrades.

And so if we want to find something that's authentically ancient, you need to have really strict contamination prevention measures.

People who go into the ancient DNA lab have to cover their hair, their skin, wear masks.

They wear specialized suits to prevent getting their modern DNA into our ancient sample that we want to look at.

Every time I work on a new individual or a population, I always think about this sample as a person.

You know, who was this person?

How did they live their life?

What did they experience?

-After processing the samples from Fenstanton, Christiana is able to compare the genetic makeup of its population with other samples from the same time period.

Her conclusions are revealing.

-So, the population of Fenstanton from a genetic perspective looked a lot more like other individuals that we've sequenced from the UK from that time period, so you could say they were probably local.

We didn't find any individuals who looked more genetically like somebody from North Africa or the Middle East, as has been found in some of the other sites from this time period.

-The ancient DNA indicates the people found at Fenstanton were local to the area.

[ Thunder rumbles ] But to confirm these results, additional tests are now performed on 4926, tests that will not only show where he's from, but also reveal details about how he lived and what he ate.

-My name's Jane Evans.

I'm a geologist.

And my particular responsibility is, in fact, to look at collaborating with archaeologists.

-70 miles north of Cambridge at the British Geological Survey in Nottinghamshire, Professor Jane Evans is a leading expert in isotopes.

-Most people will be familiar with the idea of elements -- calcium, iron, and oxygen.

But those elements sometimes have slightly different forms caused by having different weights, or masses.

And so an isotope is the name we give to the different types of a particular element.

When you get a situation where you've excavated an individual and you know nothing about them, isotopes can really start to give you some constraints and control on who they were and where they come from.

-By taking tiny samples from ancient teeth and bones and analyzing the isotopes within, Jane can re-create the lives of long-dead people.

She's worked on some unique cases, including analyzing a tooth of King Richard III.

-We can, with a single tooth, do analysis for carbon, nitrogen, sulfur, lead, strontium, and oxygen, which can tell us about a person's diet, where they lived, the levels of pollution they were exposed to.

Strontium is an interesting element because its isotope composition is related to ultimately the rocks on which our food supply was grown, and we can map those variations across Britain.

Oxygen isotopes are derived, or picked up, from the water you drink.

Sulfur is an interesting and quite new element to be used.

If you're living in an area of swampy land where the conditions are very wet, the plants pick up an interesting sulfur signature.

-Strontium, oxygen, and sulfur levels can pinpoint where a person lived, but nitrogen levels tell more about how they lived.

-Nitrogen basically tells you how high up the food chain you are.

So people with a high meat diet will have higher nitrogen values than, say, vegans or herbivores.

-What will 4926's isotopes reveal about his life?

-Well, he had a fairly elevated nitrogen value, which suggests that there was a significant component of meat in his diet, and the carbon isotopes show that also there was a slight shift over towards a marine component.

This, again, is quite typical of the Roman populations who make use of fish sauces and this kind of thing.

-A typical Roman diet.

And when it comes to where 4926 lived, the isotopes suggest something striking.

-This map enables us to enter the isotope data and to reject any areas in Britain that don't match it.

So, I've marked Fenstanton, where the individual was found, on the map here, and if we start with the oxygen, you'll see that we exclude the western area of Britain as a place where he could have spent his childhood.

If we add to that the strontium, this further reduces the possible childhood origins of the individual into the southeast area of Britain.

But if I then add the sulfur isotopes, this really reduces it to a very small area.

This is where he was found.

And these orange areas represent the areas where he could have spent his childhood based on the isotope composition of his teeth.

-Clear evidence that 4926 was from Cambridgeshire.

-I've done a lot of these studies, and this study is particularly interesting because of how well we've been able to pinpoint it.

This is by far and away the best location of an individual that we've achieved.

-Jane's analysis also shows that 4926's isotope levels barely changed over the course of his life.

-I would say this guy is really quite sedentary, quite static.

-4926 was a local Cambridgeshire man who never left the area, but it's clear his diet was affected by the presence of Romans.

How else did the empire shape his life?

Did it affect his home, his lifestyle, his work?

And what exactly might that work have been?

The virtual autopsy offers Ben and Corinne a tantalizing clue.

-You've got red for the really heavily dense areas, and then greens into less dense bone.

And you're seeing a distribution of density across the skeleton here.

-We could look at his arms and see whether there's any substantial changes there.

-There is here.

-He's got greater density in his right forearm than his left.

-Hmm.

-So that suggests there might have been some kind of specialist activity that he was constantly doing.

We've seen this in medieval and later times rope-makers who are constantly making the same twisting movement over and over again with their forearms.

-We're not seeing it in the humerus here.

So we're not seeing manual -- He's not chopping with an ax.

-It's rather nice seeing that disproportion, isn't it?

-It's amazing that we're starting to re-create not only his age and his sex, but suddenly maybe what job he did.

-The remains from Fenstanton showed signs of degeneration and disease, implying the people there were physical laborers.

Skeleton 4926 likely did some kind of manual job.

Finding out where he lived will help determine what he did.

What kind of settlement was uncovered at Fenstanton?

A grand Roman town?

A humble farm?

Or something else entirely?

To help visualize what the settlement may have looked like, David from Albion Archaeology has come to Butser Ancient Farm, near England's South Coast.

Here, re-creations of ancient homes have been painstakingly built by a team of experts.

-We think that the settlement at Fenstanton started off in the Roman period, in probably the 1st century AD.

Fenstanton was a roadside settlement, a specific type of Roman settlement.

It would have been like a village.

The site that we excavated was on the southern edge of the village.

But at the northern edge, there are bits and pieces that have been excavated in the past suggesting that there's a Roman villa there.

The building that I'm standing next to is the sort of building that you might have seen at the northern edge of Fenstanton.

Villas, although they were quite grand to us, they were essentially farms.

You got clusters of them around some of the larger Roman towns and Roman cities where they needed to supply the cities with food, grain, meat, and so on.

At somewhere like Fenstanton, it would have been a local aristocrat living there who would have looked after the local countryside.

-It's probable that 4926's settlement was overseen by a wealthy landlord or custodian.

And as Butser's replica suggests, a villa would have been a statement of power.

-Roman villas were very much luxurious, opulent, lavishly decorated.

It was to display your wealth.

They'd have invited other local aristocrats around, public officials, to demonstrate how well they'd adopted the Roman lifestyle.

Britain was one of the furthest outposts of the Roman Empire, but Roman villas would have been a reminder to anyone living in Roman Britain that they were still part of this empire.

-Villas became increasingly popular in Britain in the 3rd century, but the average native, like 4926, wouldn't have experienced their comforts.

Most Britons were probably still living in houses similar to the ones their ancestors had lived in before the Roman occupation.

-Somewhere like Fenstanton, even though we know there's a villa on the northern edge of the village, most of the buildings around there would have been peasant structures, native structures, possibly still the roundhouses.

-And Butser's Iron Age village helps bring to life the broader settlement and the kind of house that this crucified man may have lived in.

-We think the Roman population of Britain had 'round about 80% to 90% of people living in rural, low-level, low-status houses where people would have also worked, carried out their business, slept, done everything all under one roof.

-A picture of 4926's existence is beginning to take shape.

He lived in a large roadside village, probably in a humble dwelling such as an Iron Age roundhouse.

And, in the shadow of a nearby luxurious Roman villa, his home would have been far less comfortable.

-It would have been a hard life for them, there's no two ways about that.

We found lots of signs of illnesses and injury on the population of the cemeteries that we excavated.

It was a very physical life.

You had to work for a living.

You were there to produce the sort of profits, surpluses for whoever owns the settlement or for the state.

-If 4926 and his peers were working for a wealthy landlord, what work were they doing?

The answer lies in animal bones uncovered at the site.

-One fascinating snapshot that we did have of industrial life there is that we had a huge number of cattle bones coming out of the excavations, and a very high percentage of those had been split.

We think they were doing this to extract marrow, grease, fat, that sort of material, out of the bones, specifically to process that for making cosmetics, soap, possibly tallow for candles.

We think they might even have been importing carcasses of pre-processed beef from nearby Roman towns, perhaps such as Godmanchester, Cambridge.

So it's not a self-sufficient settlement.

It's part of a much bigger network.

-4926 may have spent his days doing specialized industrial work, extracting marrow from bones for processing, which might explain the increased density in his right forearm that Corinne and Ben spotted.

A simple man, worked to the bone as part of a vast empire.

But other items found at Fenstanton complicate the image of a working village.

Kathy from Albion Archaeology has assembled some of the artifacts uncovered at Fenstanton.

Dr. James Gerrard, an expert in Roman material culture, is analyzing the items to better understand the place where 4926 lived.

-I've worked on a lot of rural sites, and certainly this is fancier, nicer, a greater quantity of metal work than we would find on a standard Romano-British site.

-It's a really nice little assemblage, isn't it?

I love these objects.

Let's start with this one.

I think this is beautiful.

We call these toilet spoons, which sounds a bit grim, but they're really sort of cosmetic instruments.

You've got a little scoop there, perhaps for makeup or medicine, and a little pointy thing there for doing a bit of scraping and poking.

And that's a real change we see from the Iron Age, this interest in personal grooming that comes with the Roman period, and that seems to go quite a long way down the social hierarchy.

And this is part of that package, isn't it?

Even on a little rural site like this, people are taking care of their appearance.

-Yeah, definitely.

-It's a very tactile object, as well.

-Yeah, it's lovely.

-You can...

It's that sense, isn't there, that this is an object that people used.

-Even if it was for scooping out their ears.

-Well indeed.

[ Both laugh ] This is a lovely object, isn't it?

Maybe you can tell me a bit more about this, because I've never seen one of these before.

-As I understand it, it's a little votive object.

So I think one of the theories is you would put a candle in it.

-And you'd have that in your household shrine for your household gods or whatever.

Beautifully decorated with that enamel.

Just really nice objects.

-Even among simple British communities like Fenstanton, Roman culture seems to have had a strong influence, adding flourishes to the Britons' personal appearance and to their homes.

-So, I've brought a selection of some of the nicer, more whole bits of pottery that we had from the site.

-These are lovely.

I love a good pot.

And, as you say, it's really nice to see almost intact vessels.

And if you look really carefully, you can see the potter's fingermarks.

-Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

That's amazing.

-So there are the fingerprints of a Roman potter.

I would think this one's probably a 3rd-century drinking vessel.

Hold it in your hands.

Probably for wine or beer.

The beer could have been made locally, but the wine probably, in the 3rd century, more likely from the Rhineland.

Perhaps German white wine.

-Hm.

-Beautiful object.

-Even an apparently rural community like this one would have had access to food and goods from across the Roman Empire.

-This is one of the differences between the Iron Age and the Roman period, is these Roman populations just had access to more stuff.

-But the cattle bones found on site serve as a stark reminder that a life spent at Fenstanton would have been a hard one.

-The idea that these animals were being slaughtered somewhere else and then the limb bones transported to the site to be processed.

It must just have been a pretty grim experience.

-Yeah.

-What you're looking at is animals being processed for the last scraps of everything.

And this is typical of the Roman world, this intensive exploitation.

-4926's life has come into clearer focus.

He was probably a laborer who never left Cambridgeshire and spent his days engaged in manual work -- a tiny cog in Rome's vast machine.

That's how 4926 lived.

But what about his death?

How and why was this man crucified?

-Every part of the skeleton tells its own chapter of a story, but I think this particular skeleton had an unexpected twist.

And it's with this.

It's this huge nail that was driven into the heel, which, for you, the first time you saw it, must have been incredible, right?

-It was incredible.

I spent a couple of years trying not to believe it.

-So presumably you've never seen anything like this before.

-Never.

-This is the heel.

This is taking a lot of the bounce when we walk.

So, back of the heel.

Back of the foot there.

Incredibly, weirdly shaped.

Quite a solid bone in some respects, isn't it?

-It is, but it actually has a very interesting composition.

-Mm-hmm.

-So, it's got a thin but dense outer coating.

And so in order to put anything through it, because it's very soft inside, you'd have to send something in with a lot of energy.

Otherwise, you would simply crush the bone.

Whereas, in this case, it looks as though there's been one swift, hard blow which has taken it through in one moment.

-There is a little notch in here, though, which isn't part of the bone typically.

Do we know what's happening here?

-I can only guess that this was a misfire.

So, somebody who's not so experienced starts driving the nail through, and it's the wrong angle or it's a bit more difficult, so they have another go.

-Hm.

Which is really indicating that this isn't accidental.

This is a very intentional heavy blow.

I'm feeling quite reverential, quite respectful to a digital image right now because of something that someone has gone through that is unimaginable to me.

-So, we always respect the remains that we work with.

And particularly when I started researching crucifixion and thinking harder about what it was like as a torture as well as a mode of death.

Yes, your word "reverential."

I give him more reverence because of what he went through.

-I think that word "torture" is very apt here.

This isn't just a man who was killed.

This is a man who was tortured.

[ Crows cawing ] -Christian iconography has established a particular understanding of how crucifixion may have taken place.

But the brutal truth is this punishment took many dreadful forms.

-Josephus does mention the Romans using different forms of crucifixion.

There's a very famous legend that Peter, one of the disciples, was crucified upside down.

-There are reports of Roman soldiers crucifying victims in a variety of positions to amuse themselves.

Can Skeleton 4926's bones reveal the specific way he was put to death?

To help shed some light on this, Corinne and Ben are joined by Dr. Piers Mitchell.

He is the only person in the world to have physically examined both 4926 and the remains of the other confirmed crucifixion victim.

-So, yes, I was very fortunate that when I was a young researcher in my 20s, when I was out in Jerusalem, I had the good fortune to see the original remains.

-The crucifixion case from Israel was uncovered in 1968 when a collection of bones was found in a 1st-century ossuary, a box for preserving skeletal remains.

As with 4926, a nail was found through a heel bone.

-When I heard that we found one from Roman period Cambridgeshire, I thought, "Wow."

A long way away, different century, but they still seem to be doing it in an extremely similar way.

The actual alignment of the nail -- the one we find here enters and crosses from the outer side of the heel to the medial side of the heel in just the same way that we see in the example from Jerusalem.

-The way these nails are inserted does not suggest that you had a body on the cross in the position of the standard crucifix.

-You're right.

Both these cases do have the heels on the outer side of the post with a nail coming from lateral to medial into the post.

-The evidence shows that, whether as additional torture or to ensure he didn't escape, 4926's foot was nailed to the side of the crucifix.

The rest of his limbs were probably fastened with ropes.

And, exposed to the elements, he would have been left to die slowly.

-I think the greatest misconception of crucifixion was that it was a quick death.

It's such a brutal form of execution that it's just almost impossible to imagine.

-What could 4926 have done to warrant this cruel and degrading punishment?

What was his crime?

-Crucifixion is a terrible way to die.

It's a form of torture and execution rolled into one, and it's very public.

One of the reasons to crucify somebody is to instill terror.

-The public nature of crucifixion was crucial.

The Romans used it to deter lower members of society from rebelling against their masters' rule.

-They're particularly intolerant of any form of treason, sedition.

That's punishable with crucifixion.

-If 4926 was some sort of rebel, fighting with or plotting against his Roman masters, it would have been grounds for crucifixion.

And there is evidence that uprisings were common throughout the Roman occupation of Britain.

-There were a number of rebellions.

Boudica is a good example.

There are others.

-The Brigantes in the north.

People died.

They were enslaved.

The Roman conquest was bloody and violent.

-Unrest in Britain continued into the 3rd century.

Could 4926 have been part of a failed uprising in Cambridgeshire that led to his crucifixion?

-At the beginning of the 3rd century, there had been a series of military problems in the north, so with the Caledonians in what's now Scotland, and they were crushed more or less by Septimius Severus.

For the rest of the 3rd century, we tend actually to think of Britain as being quite quiet.

-There is no strong evidence to suggest an insurrection around Fenstanton in the 3rd century.

If 4926 wasn't a rebel, what are some other possible reasons for his crucifixion?

-In Latin, they call crucifixion the "servile supplicium," the servile punishment.

So it's a punishment used particularly for slaves.

So if he was a slave, then he could have been crucified for nearly any reason.

-Unlike citizens, slaves had no legal protection.

Their masters could, in theory, crucify them for even small infractions.

4926 might have been a slave who somehow displeased his master.

But in the Roman world, things were not that simple.

-In the 1st century AD, Roman citizenship was really important legally.

So certain things couldn't happen to you if you're a Roman citizen.

In normal circumstances, you wouldn't be crucified.

-Before the 3rd century, only a minority of the empire's population qualified for citizenship.

Such status guaranteed privileges and protections.

But that all changed.

-So, the date usually given is 212 AD.

We have something called the Constitutio Antoniniana, or the Edict of Caracalla, which gave citizenship to the majority of people in the Roman Empire.

-No one knows why Emperor Caracalla expanded Roman citizenship.

-Some ancient authors say that Caracalla only gave everybody citizenship because it increased the number of taxpayers.

-Whatever his reasons, Caracalla made more people citizens than ever before.

But that did not mean that life became better or safer for the poorest in society.

-We start to see this really important legal distinction between so-called "honestiores," the honest men, and the "humiliores," the humble men.

-People of a higher status and people who are "more humble," to give a sort of literal translation.

-We have accounts of people undergoing examination in Roman courts.

And often those examinations will start with, "What is your status?"

And the humiliores -- almost all of their punishments are unpleasant and physical.

-And now actually humiliores, who could be citizens, can also suffer something like crucifixion.

-By the 3rd century, both slaves and citizens of low status could be crucified, and no evidence survives to tell which 4926 was.

But in the later Roman period, the number of executions across the empire increased.

-As we go through the Roman period, the empire becomes increasingly autocratic and judicial punishments become increasingly savage.

And that's probably the sign of an empire that is struggling to enforce its will.

-Evidence suggests the 3rd century in Britain was relatively peaceful, and, yet, more executions were taking place.

The empire was becoming increasingly brutal, with far more crimes punishable by death.

So, whether free or enslaved, a low-status man like 4926 could have been executed for even a minor crime.

-You have a legal system, but who has access to that legal system?

And is the legal system fair?

It's a legal system in which confessions are only admissible if they have been achieved through torture.

Governors can make decisions in arbitrary fashions.

They can choose to execute people even if the law says they shouldn't.

Who's going to stop them?

-4926 lived on a wild edge of empire.

He could have been crucified for being a rebel or he could have simply displeased a sadistic master.

The real reason for his death remains unknown.

Though 4926 met a horrible and tragic end, there is one final mystery that suggests something more hopeful.

-Something I find very intriguing about this is, this man has been subjected to this horrendous death and torture, and, yet, he was obviously given over to his population afterwards to have an absolutely normal burial.

-Some texts imply that after crucifixion, victims were left to rot or dumped in a common grave, but that does not seem to be the case with 4926.

-Some part of the community was interested in giving this man a respectful burial.

We know that you could petition the person in power who ordered the execution to collect the corpse of your loved one or friend or whoever.

You know, the most famous example of crucifixion, the crucifixion of Jesus, Joseph of Arimathea petitions Pontius Pilate and collects the body and gives the body a formal burial.

We're probably seeing something similar here.

Friends and family have collected this body and given it a respectful burial.

-His burial suggests that, despite his awful and humiliating execution, there were still people in 4926's community who cared about him.

DNA analysis from other Fenstanton graves could provide more insight.

-In the 20 individuals that we looked at from Fenstanton, we found evidence of two close genetic relationships.

One was a first-degree relationship, and the other was a second-degree relationship.

First-degree relationships are a parent or an offspring or full siblings.

Second-degree relationships are maybe a grandparent and their grand offspring or an aunt, uncle.

-The evidence shows the people of Fenstanton spent their entire lives there, and some were related.

This suggests a tight-knit community, one that cared for 4926 after his dreadful end.

-Whatever he did in life and whoever punished him, he was accepted in death.

He sort of went back into his community after death.

So I think that's quite moving, really.

-Joe Mullins is a forensic artist and professor at George Mason University in Virginia.

-As a forensic artist, most of my work comes from law enforcement.

That is, these are active investigations of unidentified skeletal remains.

-Joe has worked with law enforcement for nearly three decades, reconstructing faces from skulls, which helps to identify victims of crime.

-Over the course of my 24 years, there's been, you know, hundreds and hundreds of skulls that I've helped law enforcement with.

-But now Joe is taking part in a world-first -- reconstructing the face of a victim of crucifixion.

-I think I've got the coolest job in the world, and this is by far the most interesting skull that I've ever worked on in my career.

For a forensic identification, I want to get crime-scene photos, clothing that was found with the victim, as much information that I can get to paint that picture of what this individual looked like in life.

That same process applies to historical cases.

I want to get as much information as I can on the front end.

If there's DNA, isotopes, phenotypes to give me information on hair color, eye colors, you know, skin tone.

-Joe is given the data Corinne collected, isotopic details from Jane Evans, and insights from Christiana Scheib, whose DNA sampling determined 4926 most likely had brown hair and brown eyes.

-As far as the information that I got for this particular case, it really is fascinating to me 'cause I was basically able to get just as much or more information for this case that's thousands of years old than I would for an active case that I've been working for law enforcement.

Now, the problem was this skull was -- it was fragmented.

There's no other way to explain it.

It is putting together a couple thousand-year-old puzzle.

Your skull is the foundation that your face is built on.

Doesn't matter how old the skull is.

All that information is gonna be laid out in front of us.

When the pieces are all together, here's what we come up with.

So I have the foundation to start building the face.

Now we've gone from our 3-D software into, really, applying the photographic elements to the face, based on all that information we got -- mid-thirties, brown hair, brown eyes.

Not exactly a healthy individual.

Now we have indication for where his lips are, the corners of the mouth, his irises, his eyebrows, the hairline, the brow ridge, all those details.

It's like a digital Mr.

Potato Head.

So as I'm clicking through the layers, you'll see some decisions that were made like, you know, hairstyles.

Now, as we add some more graphic elements, we're applying that.

The sunken cheeks, all those things that would've naturally taken place under these harsh conditions.

-Piece by piece, Joe is able to give this particular victim of crucifixion a kind of second life.

-It's not just a skull anymore.

I'm staring at a face from thousands of years ago.

And staring at this face is something I'll never forget.

-More than five years after the dig at Fenstanton, Corinne and David are in Northamptonshire, ready to tell 4926's story to a room full of fellow archaeologists.

But before they do, there's a final piece to add to their presentation -- Joe's reconstruction, which they're about to see for the first time.

-Isn't this wonderful, seeing it develop?

[ Gasps ] -That's never what I'd have guessed.

[ Both laugh ] That's really impressive.

-It is such a brilliant reconstruction, isn't it?

It's just so living.

Those details are wonderful.

-It really marks him out as an individual, not just "Skeleton 4926," as he's been up until now.

-He just looks like someone that I used to work with in the Health Service years ago.

Ancient people and modern people.

There's no taking us apart, is there?

-No.

Exactly.

This looks like someone you could meet on the streets of Fenstanton today.

-This man had such a particularly awful end of life that it feels as though seeing his face, we can give more respect to him.

-It's fantastic that we've been able to use the DNA evidence and the osteological analysis that you've done, Corinne, and build this picture together.

We can bring him back to life almost nearly 2,000 years on.

-It's always a real joy to work with other osteoarchaeologists, just to start with, but I love it when we can have multidisciplinary feedback, to and fro.

So it's been a wonderful opportunity to put a lot more time in and talk to people all over the place.

So it's just been tremendously enriching for me.

-Whenever you see archaeology portrayed on the screen, it's always exciting, world-shattering events.

Most of what we do is very prosaic.

And this is just something that you don't find.

It's the sort of find of a lifetime.