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Dr
Elizabeth
Popescu
Head of Post-Excavation & Publications
Oxford Archaeology (Cambridge)
15 Trafalgar Way
Bar Hill
Cambridgeshire
CB23 8SQ
Tel: 01954 01223-850552
Fax: 01954 273376
Fig 4.10 Period 1.1 Cemetery 2, reinterred child burial sk45210. Scale 1:50. Click the image for a full-size version in a new window.
This previously unknown cemetery, which produced two 8th- to 9th-century radiocarbon dates (Bayliss in Shepherd Popescu forthcoming a), lay across the northern part of the excavated area (Fig_4.10). A number of possible 'graves' were aligned north-west to south-east or north to south. This burial ground would have lain roughly equidistant between the cemetery beneath the later south bailey rampart (Cemetery 3) and that recorded beneath the north-east bailey (Ayers 1985). Redeposited human bone was recovered across the whole of the northern part of the site, with a notable focus to the east, surrounding the only surviving grave which was that of a child aged 2-3 years (sk.45210; sk45210). This clothed or shroud-wrapped body had clearly been disturbed and had apparently been moved and reburied less than two years after its initial burial. A total of about forty-three individuals relating to this cemetery is suggested, of which twenty-one were children or sub-adults below the age of eighteen years at death. Pathologies included a possible case of Paget's disease. Had this cemetery survived the creation of the great barbican ditch and rampart in the 13th century, which its main focal point suggests it did, it was probably only finally destroyed by the dramatic Cattle Market landscaping of the 18th and 19th centuries. Additional bone recovered further to the west of the Castle Mall site may relate to the same, or perhaps even a different, early cemetery.
Previous observations add to the distribution plot of human bone in this general area, some of which at least may represent further individuals from the same cemetery or perhaps from other early cemeteries in the vicinity of the castle (Fig_4.140). A human skull was found to the west of the castle in the 1960s (Site 218N) and other skulls were recovered from the southern end of the castle bridge in 1807 and 1934 (Site 243N). Further burials were disturbed during the construction of the Cattle Market in 1738, although their location was not noted.
The widespread dispersal of human remains, taken alongside the evidence for in situ burial, could indicate that much of the area of this ridge of high ground in the south-western part of the Saxon town was already in used for burial during the Middle Saxon period. A similar situation is apparent at Dover Castle, where an early inhumation cemetery on a hilltop was superseded by the Late Saxon church of St Mary in Castro which remained in use within the confines of the later castle (Biddle 1970; Haslam 1984, 23). At Newcastle-upon-Tyne, a cemetery founded in c.700 remained in use until (and to a limited extent after) the construction of the 12th-century castle (Barbara Harbottle, pers. comm.).
The only burial of similar date recorded from central Norwich comes from St Martin-at-Palace (a church mentioned in Domesday; Site 584N) where excavations in 1988 revealed evidence for an 11th-century stone church, pre-dated by two timber ones at least one of which may also have served as a church. The earliest recorded burial here was radiocarbon dated (OxA-2320) and yielded a range of 1460±90, cal AD400-770 (95% confidence; Beazley 2001, 48). A Middle, rather than Early, Anglo-Saxon date was postulated (Beazley 2001, 54).