A thousand-year-old brutal act. The girl was scalped before her death and cut off her nose and lips

“We can only speculate about what this was about, but the highly formalized nature of girls’ injuries suggests that it was a punishment for a specific act, such as sexual deviance or at least something that society at the time perceived,” Garrard Cole told Science News. , an honorary researcher at the Institute of Archeology, University of London.

The skull was originally discovered in the 1960s during excavations prior to the construction of a new housing estate in the village of Oakridge in the southern part of Hamp County, England. However, scientists did not analyze it at that time. To this day, it is also unclear whether the girl’s body was buried somewhere near the skull.

Later, the skull became part of the collection, which is now managed by the Hampshire Cultural Heritage Institute. During a recent audit of the collection, the scientists noticed the skull again. “It was still covered with clay, indicating that no one had examined it before,” said Cole, who and his colleagues decided to study the finding.

She was young and abused before her death

Several tests revealed a few details about the individual to whom the skull belonged: according to anatomical analysis, it was a man between the ages of fifteen and eighteen, and DNA analysis showed that the man was a woman.

The radiocarbon dating method indicated that the girl lived sometime between 776 and 899 AD, and analysis of various isotopes and other remnants of elements from her teeth suggested that she did not appear to grow up in the Cretaceous hills. This means that she was probably not born or matured in any part of most of central, eastern and southern England, so it is quite likely that she was an outsider at the time.

The research team also focused on skull wounds, the marks of which were particularly strong around the nose and mouth. “There have been at least two cuts of bone from the side of the nostril and a cut between the nose and the upper front teeth,” Cole said.

According to him, both shots appear to have been caused by a sharp weapon with a thin blade. “In the Anglo-Saxon period, dating from 410 to 1066, the iron knife most likely corresponds to this. A second sharp-edged weapon, a sword, would be too heavy and massive for that,” Cole explained.

The researchers also noted that the old teenager had a shallow incision across her forehead, which they interpreted as an indication that someone had cut off part of her skin and hair. “Scalping usually leaves more traces of the cut, but it is possible that others have wiped out over time because the skull has not been protected from external influences for hundreds of years,” Cole said.

She did not survive the torture

The teenage girl probably did not survive this traumatic event, because the edges of the wounds show no signs of healing, the researchers stated in their study.

Even if the girl’s torturers did not cut off her lips or the skin on her forehead, “a nose injury was enough to cause her death, because such a wound probably damaged the network of arteries in the back of the nose,” the researchers wrote. According to them, the crossing of these arteries would cause a speck of blood, which would probably suffocate the girl.

Why the young girl had to die in such a terrifying way remains a mystery. It is possible that she was lynched by the crowd for something she perceived as a serious offense, it is possible that she was sentenced to this harsh punishment by some local authorities at the time for something she had done wrong. The method of punishment suggests, for example, that it may have been something that was perceived as a sexual deviation, but without further evidence, archaeologists may never know.

“However, female face mutilation and, in parallel, male castration, appear to be a long-standing worldwide practice,” Cole said. The Anglo-Saxon rulers officially introduced this punishment into their formal codes later in the 10th century, but this case had happened before.

“We know this practice did take place, but we have no idea how often it was applied,” Cole concluded.

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