The Romans were blamed for massacring these Iron Age warriors. But did they actually murder themselves?
New research on skeletons from Maiden Castle in Dorset casts doubt on theory of cemetery of Iron Age warriors killed by advancing Roman legions
When the invading Roman legions assaulted the mighty hillfort of Maiden Castle, in Dorset in the middle of the 1st century AD, they killed and quickly buried its British defenders among the ramparts.
That’s the story that the celebrated archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler proposed in the 1940s, following the excavations on the site that he and his equally talented wife Tessa carried out before the Second World War (she died in 1936, but he carried on their research).
Wheeler discovered what he described as a war cemetery in the East Gate ramparts. He found 34 skeletons there, many with horrific injuries. He concluded that these burials were all made in one episode, following an assault on the fort by the advancing legions of Roman soldiers after their landing in Britain in AD 43.
That colourful narrative has been challenged by academics in recent decades. This year, 2025, Martin Smith, Miles Russell, and Paul Cheetham, authors of a new paper ‘Fraught with high tragedy: a contextual and chronological reconsideration of the Maiden Castle Iron Age ‘war cemetery’ (England)’ (Oxford Journal of Archaeology) suggest that actually, the evidence points to these burials representing several moments of lethal self-inflicted violence, perhaps over many generations, spread mostly between the early and middle decades of the 1st century AD. In other words, the Iron Age Britons at Maiden Castle were killing each other long before the Romans arrived – and they did so with extreme violence in some cases.
Maiden Castle is a huge, and famous, archaeological site in southern England. With Neolithic origins, it was occupied through much of the Iron Age. Its multiple ramparts enclose a vast space, which English Heritage describes as being equivalent to 50 football pitches.
During excavations in the 1930s, archaeologists uncovered Iron Age burials scattered across the site. Although only a small part of Maiden Castle has been excavated, most of the remains found were of adult men, and many of them showed signs of traumatic injuries.
- Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age
The authors of the new paper detail the violent story: “The most frequent class of unhealed weapon injury was sharp force trauma (incised cuts or perpendicular chopping blows by bladed implements) both in terms of the number of individuals affected (17) and also the total number of wounds observed (49). Blunt force injuries were the next most frequent (10 individuals, 15 injuries), followed by penetrating injuries from pointed implements (three individuals, four wounds)”.
If that’s not brutal enough, some of the burials show evidence of overkill, or particularly extreme violence “inflicting multiple wounds in combinations far beyond what would be required to terminate or incapacitate”. Such overkill is particularly marked in the unfortunate inhabitants of the shared graves. Stable isotope analysis of these bones also shows that the people buried at Maiden Castle (in this sample at least) enjoyed diets rich in animal protein, which could indicate that they were higher status members of the community.
This new assessment of how these people’s lives ended is based on a radiocarbon dating programme on the skeletal remains, and a reanalysis of the burial patterning of the graves across the hillfort. That has indicated to the authors that there isn’t strong evidence for Wheeler’s single catastrophic event theory. Rather, they see the burials among the ramparts as indicative of “three possibly brief episodes of lethal violence, each a generation apart”, and all most likely before the Roman invasion.
The violent deaths of those buried at Maiden Castle may have been the result of a multi-generational power struggle before the Romans arrived. As the authors of the paper observe, “This pattern is plausibly suggestive of increasing societal stress in the decades leading up to the Roman conquest in the mid AD 40s, following which the area was formally pacified”.
Fascinatingly, and gruesomely, Smith, Russell and Cheetham also propose that the particularly violent examples of ‘overkill’ could be explained as performative executions, for an audience, willing or unwilling, to witness. The public mutilation and death of leading men leads the authors to suggest “the idea that these represent an episodic dynastic struggle where the outcome was intended to send a clear message to a wider audience”.
This interpretation is at odds with the Roman attack narrative of Mortimer Wheeler.
“This was a case of Britons killing Britons, the dead being buried in a long-abandoned fortification,” notes Dr Russell. “The Roman army committed many atrocities, but this does not appear to be one of them.”
Bournemouth University’s Dr Miles Russell, one of the authors of this paper, is also a regular contributor to HistoryExtra. You can listen to him answering all the key questions about Roman Britain in this Everything you wanted to know podcast episode.
Authors
David Musgrove is content director of the HistoryExtra.com website and podcast, plus its sister print magazines BBC History Magazine and BBC History Revealed. He has a PhD in medieval landscape archaeology and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.