‘Game of Thrones-style families' behind 2,000-year-old Dorset massacre
Game of Thrones -like barons in England were responsible for the brutal massacre of dozens of people 2,000 years ago, research has revealed.
The 62 skeletons, found with skulls ' smashed to oblivion ', were unearthed in 1936 at a mass burial site in Maiden Castle, Dorset.
Researchers at the time blamed the Roman invasion of Britain in AD43 for their deaths - something that resonated with British fears of a Nazi invasion in the 1930s.
But Bournemouth University archaeologist Dr Miles Russell revealed the bones actually dated to around the first century AD, by using modern dating techniques.
'They died violently and with overkill. These were Game of Thrones-like barons with one dynasty wiping out another,' Dr Russell told The Independent.
'Their skulls have been repeatedly smashed to oblivion with swords and other weapons. People were dragged up there and put to death.'
Dr Russell said those killed were an aristocratic elite murdered and buried with honour, something that would not have been done for common criminals.
'They could have been competing for a throne or power, and it was important to finish them off and destroy the blood line,' he added.
Sir Mortimer Wheeler led excavations of the Iron Age hill fort in the 1930s, and popularised the idea that the remains belonged to English people slain by 'barbaric' pillaging Romans.
Because the site was still occupied in AD43, Sir Mortimer was convinced the skeletons were evidence of a Roman campaign against native Britons, according to Historic England.
Dr Russell said this was a reasonable assumption to make at the time without access to modern carbon dating systems used today.
He said this dramatic explanation for the burial site would have helped attract funding for archaeological digs, something that was in short supply in the 1930s.
'They were thugs with resources and private armies. The hill fort dominated the horizon, and these people were done to death publicly,' Dr Russell added.
Maiden Castle is one of the largest Iron Age hill forts in Europe, around the size of 50 football pitches, according to Historic England.
The castle's ramparts were constructed around 2,400 years ago and protected hundreds of residents.
Within a few decades of the arrival of the Romans, the hill fort was abandoned, Historic England added.
The Romans then built the town of Dorchester to the north-east as the regional capital of the Durotriges.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Times
7 minutes ago
- Times
‘No Carbon' Carney has left us high and dry
A bit like a sort of unreliable boyfriend. This, rather brilliantly, was the description of the record of the governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, by the Labour MP Pat McFadden, then a member of the Treasury select committee. That was in 2014, when the handsome Canadian, hailed as the 'George Clooney of central banking', was just a year into his tenure. McFadden was not talking about Carney's personal life: it was a metaphor for his policy of interest rate 'forward guidance', which was proving no sort of guidance at all. It was all over the place. In one respect, however, there was complete consistency in Carney's record over seven years as this country's most powerful unelected figure. He determinedly used his position to push Britain's banks into defunding the oil and gas industry, on the grounds that man-made climate change was of primary importance, and that financial institutions should base their investment decisions on the proposition that 80 per cent of the planet's hydrocarbon reserves were 'un-burnable'. His wise predecessor, Mervyn King, questioned the decision to make fighting climate change part of the Bank of England's remit, arguing that it made 'absolutely no sense' to add 'net zero' to its responsibilities, and that the Bank should stick to its knitting (interest rates and price stability) and leave environmental policies to the politicians. However, after leaving the Bank in 2020, Carney stuck to his mission. Under the auspices of the UN, he set up the Net Zero Banking Alliance, co-opting a large number of the world's biggest banks, representing $74 trillion in assets, into basing their lending on the mission to achieve 'net zero by 2050'. This, combined with the Labour government's policies under Ed Miliband, has meant that, as one British oil company executive put it to me, 'Not a single UK bank will lend to the North Sea industry'. The Net Zero Banking Alliance, more recently, has suffered an exodus of its American members, which have fallen in line with Donald Trump's agenda (summarised as 'Drill, baby, drill'). But surely, now that Carney has at last achieved his ambition of becoming Canadian prime minister, he is using all the power of that position to fight the good fight. Er, no. One reason Carney actually won the recent election was that he pledged to scrap the 'carbon tax' implemented by Justin Trudeau, for which he had previously proselytised. In office Carney has kept that promise — and in recent weeks gone much further in the opposite direction to everything he did when Bank of England governor. He appointed as energy minister a man who was an executive of an oil exploration and production company in Alberta, the heart of Canada's vast hydrocarbon reserves. These are known as the Alberta oil sands, covering an area the size of England and described some years ago by National Geographic (not a fan) as 'the world's largest industrial project … Especially north of Fort McMurray, where the boreal forest has been razed and bitumen is mined from the ground in immense open pits, the blot on the landscape is incomparable.' Carney has relaxed the emission restrictions that hampered this development (among others) and declared two weeks ago that he wanted Canada to be 'an energy superpower … in both clean and conventional energies. And, yes, that does mean oil and gas. It means using our oil and gas here in Canada to displace imports wherever possible, particularly from the United States. It makes no sense to be sending that money south of the border or across the ocean, so, yes, it also means more oil and gas exports, without question.' • The oil-rich Canadian cowboys who want their own Brexit What accounts for this remarkable transformation? Pure political expediency. Trudeau's policy had been profoundly unpopular, and the Conservative candidate, Pierre Poilievre, constantly referred to 'carbon tax Carney'. So, shamelessly disowning his own previous advocacy, Carney dumped it. Then there were the idiotic threats from Trump to annex Canada. While that will 'never happen' (to quote Carney), the prospect of Albertan secession was less improbable, as that province had been sorely provoked by the ecologically motivated threats to its hydrocarbon industry. Canada as a whole could not afford such a secession, and immediately after Carney's election win, the premier of Alberta, Danielle Smith, introduced a bill to make a referendum on the matter much simpler to implement. She simultaneously called on Carney to make various concessions, which 'must include abandoning the unconstitutional oil and gas production cap'. He got the message. It was no coincidence that, as host of last week's G7 summit, Carney chose to hold it in Alberta. In the final communiqué, the topic of climate change was barely mentioned. To put it mildly, this has confused those who deeply admired Carney, not least in this country, for his previously passionate campaigning against oil and gas investment. But when I asked someone who worked closely with the man at the Bank of England what had happened to his old boss, he laughed and said: 'I must have told you before that Mark is fundamentally a trader, and therefore prepared to adapt principles to circumstances.' This was partly a reference to the fact that Carney's career before becoming a central banker was at Goldman Sachs. But what does this mean for the UK, still thoroughly enmeshed by the net zero policies in which Carney played such a central role? As Brendan Long, a Canadian energy analyst, told The Daily Telegraph last week: 'It means that while Canada's oil and gas industry is ramping up production under Carney, the UK remains aligned with the anti-oil and gas ideology he promoted when he was governor of the Bank of England.' Although Ed Miliband has now indicated a reversal of his opposition to the development of two North Sea fields, known as Rosebank and Jackdaw, the government is keeping its radical policy of banning all new exploration; across the median line, Norway has declared it will be boosting its North Sea exploration and production to the highest level since 2010. The crazy point, which fits in with the government's target but not the national interest, is that if we buy Norwegian gas, it does not come out of our 'carbon budget', as administered by the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero. Similarly, when we've shut down our entire domestic oil and gas operation and are buying the Canadian hydrocarbons that Carney is now so keen to boost, we will make the (unelected) Climate Change Committee — charged with setting our carbon budgets and invigilating our progress to purity — happy. Not so much the British voters, I fear, come our own general election in a few years' time.
Times
32 minutes ago
- Times
Abortion overreach will backfire on women
One of the many, many reasons I prefer living in the UK to the US is the former's more clement weather, which reflects the country's calmer politics. By contrast, America's storms and wildfires feel like a metaphor for its political debates, not least on abortion. So it's apt that, just as a heatwave arrives in this country, the British left loses its mind over abortion. Last week MPs voted to support an amendment, proposed by the Labour MP Tonia Antoniazzi, which argues that women who obtain an abortion should never be prosecuted, even if it's after the legal 24-week limit. This sounds good in theory (abortion should not be criminalised, yes, agreed) but is in fact completely nuts. The law already allows late-term abortions in extreme circumstances, but now a woman could have an abortion the day before her due date for any reason she fancied. Now, very few women will do this, and in fact very few ever have, and the harrowing stories that have been used to justify this vote largely took place during the Covid lockdown, when women were buying abortion pills in the post and couldn't see doctors to find out how far along they were in their pregnancy. So: not a widespread problem, and one that could be resolved by re-examining how the Crown Prosecution Service deals with these sad cases. • `Read more: MPs vote to decriminalise abortion Instead, MPs have decided to chuck out the UK's heretofore liberal but pragmatic approach in favour of something far more radical that most people don't want: 87 per cent of the British public are in favour of legalised abortion, but more than half draw the line at the abortion of a healthy baby over the six-month limit. Antoniazzi's amendment upends the delicate compromise that existed until now. Sensing their moment has come, politicians on the right are already arguing that the time limit here should be cut, in line with most of Europe. Meanwhile, some on the left are arguing the amendment doesn't go far enough. Stella Creasy proposed a further amendment, which was written by the part-time tax barrister, occasional fox murderer and full-time tweeter Jolyon Maugham, that would have made it impossible even to prosecute those who coerced women into late-term abortions. This was considered so extreme it was rejected by every abortion provider in the country, and also, wisely, by MPs. Undaunted, Creasy, who seems to believe she represents Washington DC rather than Walthamstow, implied that rejecting her amendment was on a par with the overturning of Roe v Wade. By way of evidence, she reeled off voguish American clichés ('the Donald Trump playbook', 'women's bodies as battlefields') which always suggest the speaker is so high on progressive platitudes they have turned off their brain. If Creasy and her ilk want to take lessons from America, they should look at what happened last week to what is euphemistically called 'paediatric gender healthcare'. On Wednesday the Supreme Court allowed red states like Tennessee to ban doctors from giving hormone treatments and body-altering surgery to gender-confused children. It is the latest blow for the gender movement in the US, and it was entirely caused by overreach by activists. Until about a decade ago, people who wanted to live as the opposite sex were seen as a niche adult demographic who should be treated with kindness. But activist groups destroyed that moderate status quo with their ludicrous arguments, such as that male rapists could be sent to women's prisons and there should be no age limit on body-altering surgery for children. The Biden administration blindly supported them until belatedly realising it was following the wilfully blind, and American politicians are now, at last, trying to undo some of the damage. None of this worked out well for trans people or the left. Progressive overreach and reality denial will always cause a backlash, something Maugham should know, given his own flailing gender activism. Creasy, too, has argued that 'some women are born with penises', suggesting a strong disconnect between her beliefs and actual biology. I'm not sure when Labour politicians decided to follow their Democrat counterparts in defending the most extreme version of a social shift, but they need to get a grip. One reason US feminists lost the abortion argument is they insisted abortion was no big deal and derided Hillary Clinton for describing it as something that should be 'safe, legal and rare', saying that last word was 'stigmatising'. It turned out that it's a lot more stigmatising to pretend getting an abortion is just a jolly lark that should come with a loyalty card. When I was 23 and 11 weeks pregnant, I had an abortion, an experience neither jolly nor terrible but necessary. Afterwards, I felt pure gratitude, which is how I still feel about it now. Since then I've sampled many experiences on the fertility menu: given birth to twins, miscarried, had a baby. You don't need to be a wet-eyed sentimentalist to know a baby becomes a baby well before it's born; I could feel when it happened to all of my babies at about the six-month mark. The legal limit exists for good reasons, including the mother's mental health, and maintaining public support for abortion. Arguing that a woman has the right to terminate a fully gestated healthy baby is the most self-defeating version of the pro-choice movement, because it will reinvigorate the anti-abortion argument in this country, just as arguing for the most extreme version of trans rights destroyed the moderate accommodations that existed before. Labour has kicked a hornets' nest with this vote. And it's women who are going to be stung.
Daily Mail
36 minutes ago
- Daily Mail
Naga Munchetty tells how she has always 'hated seeing people bullied' - after she too faced complaint amid probes into BBC Breakfast culture
Naga Munchetty has said she 'hated' to see people bullied at school after it was revealed she allegedly bullied a junior staffer on BBC Breakfast last year. In an interview days before the allegations against her resurfaced, the presenter, 50, had said she battled against rude comments made about her appearance and talent. The TV and radio host from south London said: 'I was no angel but I hated seeing people bullied. 'I remember there were a couple of kids in school who were bullied and I just hated it. 'So I'd always kind of be that person who would speak to everyone.' Speaking on the Walking The Dog With Emily Dean podcast she explained that she confronts people that upset her at work. The presenter, who is already at the centre of BBC Breakfast 's toxicity row, was reportedly spoken to by bosses over a sex jibe she made while off-air at BBC Radio 5 Live. This comes as BBC Breakfast finds itself at the centre of a bullying and misconduct probe, with editor Richard Frediani taking an extended period of leave after an internal review of the allegations was opened into the show. According to The Sun, Naga used a slang term for a sex act during an off-air break. In an interview days before the allegations against her resurfaced, the presenter, 50, had said she battled against rude comments made about her appearance and talent The alleged remark in 2022 was said to have stunned the studio and led to Naga being spoken to by bosses. It was then reported that on BBC Breakfast last year, Naga was spoken to over alleged bullying of a woman. The BBC are now reportedly facing questions over whether there are 'double standards'. It comes as it was also reported that BBC Breakfast's editor Richard has taken an extended period of leave, after an internal review of bullying and misconduct allegations was opened into the show. It was previously claimed that the show's staff are feeling increasingly 'uneasy' around Frediani, with the former Head of ITV News accused of 'shaking' a female editor while working on the show. The Sun claimed that Richard has stepped back from the show, and while he had already taken time off to go on holiday, has mutually agreed to extend his break. Sources are also claiming that BBC bosses have held a series of meetings on how to handle the developing crisis. In an internal email obtained by the publication, John McAndrew, Director of Live and Daily News, thanked staff for their 'positivity' during this 'stressful time' - and informed them of Richard's decision. A source added: 'Fredi was already taking a break because obviously the allegations against him have been pretty damning, and he needed time to reflect. 'He's devastated by some of the claims and has also had a lot of behind the scenes support from colleagues, many of whom think he's a brilliant boss. 'BBC executives have ensured duty of care measures and he is still in touch with a few of the team. Right now, it's imperative that the BBC gets its house in order and ensures everyone is happy.' When contacted by MailOnline, a BBC representative said: 'While we do not comment on individual cases, we take all complaints about conduct at work extremely seriously and will not tolerate behaviour that is not in line with our values. 'We have robust processes in place and would encourage any staff with concerns to raise them directly with us so they can be addressed.'
