A shackled male skeleton discovered in June this year by house builders in a garden in Rutland suggested a gruesome history – rare evidence of slavery in Roman Britain nearly 2,500 years ago. With feet bound by iron fetters, the body seemed to have been thrown in a ditch.
When builders dig, the past pops up - as the hundreds of archaeologists working on the new high-speed rail link HS2 know only too well. The archaeological sector is bolstered by money from road and rail builders obliged to investigate the history of the land they build upon.
As HS2 progresses, the body count is mounting: tens of thousands of bodies famously were disinterred from a burial ground beside London’s Euston Station in 2018 to make way for construction. In 2019, a 19th-century burial ground at HS2’s rail station in Birmingham was dug up and the bodies reburied, but not before archaeologists could examine the skeletons and artefacts buried with them.
Now, archaeologists are exhuming...