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Narrator: It is discovered in northern England.
Near the border with Scotland.
At first, they think it is a monkey.
Then investigators realize that,
hidden under the floor of an old army
barracks, is a corpse.
A specialist with homicide is on the way.
Preliminary observations at the
crime scene indicate the victim may have
been bound, with blunt force trauma to the
skull.
The guilty party must be found.
But there are a few complications.
Our victim died nearly 1,800 years ago.
And the last conversation they had,
was probably in Latin.
We head straight to the scene of the crime with
Andrew Birley, an archaeologist
specializing in Roman Britain.
The site is now ruins, nestled among the sheep
farms of northern England.
But 1,800 years ago, this was a crucial fort
on the northernmost border of the Roman
Empire: Vindolanda.
Over 600 soldiers were stationed here.
Guarding the province called Britannia from
invasion by ancestors of the modern-day
Scots.
Andrew Birley: We're standing here in the
middle of the Roman fort of Vindolanda at,
the most populous building inside the
fort, if you will, a Roman barrack blocks.
And they look a little bit like the ground
floor of a motel.
There's lots of rooms joined together and in
each room, like this little room we see
before us here, we'd have eight Roman
soldiers living inside.
Now these spaces look incredibly cramped and
they are, really.
But also, we may not get everybody inside
that barrack living in there at the same time.
Some of the guys would be on patrol.
They'd be out of the fort.
We have a little veranda where you can
imagine people sitting, perhaps playing games,
doing their washing, eating.
And then a little road that I'm standing on
here, metal street surface, another drain,
another veranda, another barrack block.
They really packed them inside the fort.
Narrator: It's the same in forts throughout the
vast Roman Empire.
In the deserts of Syria.
Or the cold northern border of Britain.
The barracks are identical.
Long rectangular buildings divided into
ten rooms, eight soldiers in each.
But here, in Vindolanda,
there is a barrack room that's not like the
others.
Andrew Birley: What makes this a remarkable
barrack room rather that just a normal
barrack room is what we found in the corner
buried under the floor here,
under the actual primary surface of the
room we found a grave.
And in that grave, almost a fully
articulated skeleton, an incredible find and
a find that really shouldn't be here.
Narrator: It is so strange that the
excavators at first didn't even think it
was human.
Andrew Birley: We thought perhaps a
monkey, that's a possibility because we
know the Romans kept primates as pets in the
barracks.
We can imagine this scenario,
but very quickly came to understand that we
weren't actually dealing with an animal
at all.
We were dealing with a human and that was
quite shocking.
Narrator: The skeleton of a person is
something no archaeologist would
expect to find here.
Andrew Birley: Nobody should be buried inside
a Roman settlement.
It's illegal.
It's completely taboo.
It's against the rules and regulations,
you are not supposed to do it.
If you are caught doing it,
you would be in serious trouble.
There is no, in my mind,
way you can explain away how this body got
under that floor, unless something truly
horrible and tragic has happened.
Narrator: It's a cold case in the deep freeze.
But to the archaeologists,
it's just the beginning.
What can the bones tell us about who this
person was?
And how did they end up in a place they should
not be?
A forensic archaeologist is called
in to work on the case.
Dr. Trudi Buck carries the victim's bones to
her lab at Durham University.
Trudi Buck: I thought from the pictures it
looked human to me but I was reserving
judgment until I went up to the site and
actually saw the remains myself.
When I saw them, as soon as I saw them it
was fairly evident that it was human.
Narrator: And from the bones,
even at first glance, Buck is sure the person
was a child.
Trudi Buck: You're working with a piece of
data in one respect, but there is always
that emotional side of it especially when it
is a child that this individual died young,
possibly in a violent or unnatural way.
I have dealt with that emotional side by,
I gave the individual a name, Georgie,
which covers both boy or girl.
And I do sometimes begin to identify with
the individual and think of it as a child
rather than "it" in a skeleton and will
sometimes chat to it when I'm working.
Narrator: But everything that Buck
learns from Georgie points to foul play.
Trudi Buck: The elbows appear to be very close
together on top of one another like this,
which is quite an unusual and difficult
position, may possibly suggest that the arms
had been tied together when they were placed
into the ground.
Narrator: So the child may have been bound,
but the next observation is even
more troubling.
Trudi Buck: There is very little of the
skull remaining, that may suggest that there
was some trauma to the head.
The context does very much suggest that it
died in a bad way, that it was buried in secret
and therefore probably hadn't had a good or
normal, natural ending.
Andrew Birley: We are dealing with a very
rapid burial.
The whole surrounding area had been cleared
away pretty quickly.
They had lifted a couple of flagstones
and pushed this person in a shallow grave
under the floor of a building and then
covered it up.
Narrator: Sometimes a person would be buried
with a coin over each eye to pay for their
passage into the underworld.
They certainly would be dressed in their best
clothes and accompanied by a few personal
possessions.
But our grave has no traces of any of these
artifacts.
One telling clue comes from
something very ordinary,
shoes.
Andrew Birley: Here we've got an imitation
adult shoe, beautifully detailed in the leather
there.
Absolutely far too much detail really for a
one-year-old to care about,
probably just toddling.
And importantly on the bottom of this shoe you
can even see they put the little studs in
onto the leatherwork.
That's really key because that's the sort
of material which would survive in our burial.
And unfortunately there are no little studs
there, suggesting that our victim wasn't
wearing shoes when he or she was buried.
Narrator: The Romans wore iron studs on the
bottom of their sandals or boots to
grip the earth.
It is another piece of evidence that leads
Birley to his ultimate conclusion.
Andrew Birley: The rapid burial,
the disguising of the burial,
the lack of due ceremony.
No grave goods.
The lack of any, ah, any inorganic clothing,
any items such as buttons or buckles,
studs on the bottoms of shoes.
None of these artifacts were present with the
burial.
And this strikes me as being just terrible and
very strange and not right.
And it's so not right: it's rotten.
And it's so rotten: I believe it's a ***.
Narrator: But if it is a ***,
who killed our boy or girl, and why?
Narrator: The Romans were in Britain for
nearly 400 years.
Is there any way to know when our
child was killed?
Andrew Birley: We dated the burial quite
precisely and we can do that because we know
that when the barrack block was constructed,
it was constructed in 213 A.D.
by the Fourth Cohort of Gauls.
And we also know that this particular burial
was placed under the primary floor surface
of this building, in the first floor that
was built when they put the building up.
Narrator: The 600 soldiers at Vindolanda
are not our usual image of Roman legionaries
who are exclusively Roman citizens.
Instead, they are auxiliaries,
who include non-citizens recruited
from outside the empire.
They fight for money and the promise of a
better future.
The unit at Vindolanda was originally
recruited from what is now France,
Belgium and Switzerland.
They are called the Fourth Cohort of Gauls.
Andrew Birley: These are not the sort of
guys you would like to meet in a dark alleyway
in the middle of the night as they spill out
of the bar.
These guys are dressed to kill and
trained to kill.
Narrator: The Fourth Cohort are not just
soldiers.
They are also the center of a community.
Andrew Birley: This is the vicus.
It's the little town outside the walls of
the fort of Vindolanda.
And it looks pristine today with the ruins
and the monuments.
But you've got to imagine this is an
absolutely bustling place in Roman times.
This is the place to be.
You'd have Roman soldiers out here
partying in the tavern just outside the gates
of the fort.
On the other side of the street we've got a
conveniently placed bakery.
So they can get fed up and tanked up once they
get outside the walls of the fort, too.
And it would be full of other traders.
Butchers.
Merchants selling all manner of different
goods.
Dogs running around in the street and
children.
Donkeys.
And above and behind these shops and houses,
you've got the families themselves.
You've got workshops bellowing out smoke,
you've got the smells of the kitchens mixing in.
If that's not enough for you,
just on the outskirts of town: You've got the
main bathhouse, the military bathhouse,
where all the soldiers go for their bathing,
cleaning, and all sorts of other things going
on in there which we can't mention.
So you just imagine this would be an
incredible place to be in Roman times.
Narrator: Like gunslingers in the
American West, the Fourth Cohort stride
through town.
Off their signature military belts,
they carry a sword on one side,
a dagger on the other.
The market features a Roman introduction to
the general economy: money.
This new form of wealth allows people to leave
their farms, and move to bigger communities
with more sophisticated jobs.
Roman coin brings together the entire
empire.
At Vindolanda, our child exists in a world
dominated by the Roman military.
But there is a separation,
because the soldiers all live within the
protection of the fort.
A little bit of Rome in the midst of a
potentially hostile environment.
The fort is full of activity.
Within the walls of the fort is everything the
Roman army needs to wage war.
An arsenal to store weapons.
Stables for the cavalry's horses.
Granaries to preserve food staples.
A safe room to store the money.
And, of course, barracks.
Vindolanda is just one of hundreds of forts
guarding the borders of one of the largest
empires in history.
You can travel from the south of Egypt to the
north of Britain on Roman roads,
speaking nothing but Latin,
spending only Roman money.
Whether a fort is in the sands of the Sahara
Desert or the snow of northern Britain,
it's designed for a Roman army based on a
building block of eight men: the contubernium.
There are 10 contuberniums in each
century, and six centuries in a cohort,
480 soldiers in all.
Andrew Birley: You couldn't possibly get
closer than these eight guys in the
contubernium, inside that barrack,
inside the fort.
This is their primary fighting force.
Narrator: They are together 24 hours a day.
They work together.
They train together.
They fight together.
They sleep together in the same room.
Simon Esmonde Cleary: The Roman soldiers are
living in barracks that, to us,
would look amazingly cramped.
You have eight men who have to live in two
quite small rooms.
Narrator: If one person in the contubernium did
something, the others would likely know.
But why would this unit of the most powerful
army in the world hide a small child under
their bedroom floor?
To understand, we have to find out more about
the victim.
Girl or boy?
How old?
Local or foreign?
And all we have are a few bones,
but they have a lot more to tell us.
Narrator: Who are we?
A lot of that information is hidden
in our skeleton.
Available if it can just be uncovered.
Trudi Buck catalogues Georgie's bones.
Analyzes and cross-references them.
Trudi Buck: From bones, we can tell quite a lot
of information about individuals.
For example, you can see signs of hard work.
Usage of muscles, which makes bones expand,
grow larger by the muscles attached to
them.
Narrator: Such development in the
child could mean that they are a slave doing
repetitive action like carrying buckets of
water or grinding corn.
Trudi Buck: In this individual,
there doesn't seem to be evidence of that.
There is no obvious signs of having
performed hard physical labor.
Narrator: The jawbone and teeth
provide clues.
Trudi Buck: So we only have these three teeth
remaining in situ in the skeleton.
In the mandible, we have an adult molar and
a deciduous molar and a pre-molar that is
erupting through the bone.
Looking at this, I'd put the age at around
nine to eleven.
Narrator: She can also tell the child is about
four-foot-seven.
And there's more.
Trudi Buck: Teeth can tell us various things,
not just age, but we can also look at
whether there has been any periods of disease
or nutritional stress like malnourishment
during the child's life.
This would appear in the enamel as a sort of
dark pitted line.
Narrator: Better developed teeth would
point to a richer child.
Maybe the daughter of the garrison's
commander.
Or a pampered slave.
Trudi Buck: Looking at the teeth and the rest
of the skeleton, it seems that the child
was fairly healthy.
Narrator: But how could a healthy,
well cared for child get involved with the
prime suspects, the Roman soldiers
themselves?
The contubernium that lives in this barrack
block at Vindolanda.
Eight men.
In room number four.
In a row of ten.
In 197 A.D., less than 20 years before our
child's death, the Roman government
finally allows soldiers to marry.
This officially acknowledges a
well-known reality: the common-law wives and
families who live in settlements just
outside forts throughout the empire.
At Vindolanda, the local culture ensures
that this is a very proper arrangement.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: The Celtic nations
throughout the Roman
Empire had a reputation for being a moral bunch
of people.
They would expect any daughter of theirs to
have gone through some sort of wedding
ceremony, a local tribal ceremony.
These weddings would have been regarded as
legal by the girl and her parents and the
rest of the local community.
Narrator: Regardless of where our child's
family is from, there is one fact that
affects everyone who lives at Vindolanda.
The Fourth Cohort is stationed just south of
Hadrian's Wall, a testament to Roman
power that still stands today.
Built by 15,000 Roman soldiers over six
years, the barrier extends 73 miles from
sea to sea near England's northern
border.
But in 213 A.D., it is much more impressive.
Hadrian's Wall ranges from 14 to 16 feet high.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: Before the Romans came
to Britain, they saw Britain as being beyond
the edge of civilized society.
This was where there were ghosts and
terrible weather.
It was not a place to go.
Once they came to Britain,
they thought it wasn't quite so bad.
But they always felt that this was the edge
of empire.
This was as far as civilization went.
And so when Hadrian's Wall is built because
they liked to have a nice boundary around
the Empire to know that within the Roman Empire
there are Romans.
There was civilization.
Beyond the Roman Empire there were aliens,
barbarians and a complete breakdown of
society.
Narrator: Forts like Vindolanda are close
by, packed with seasoned troops to
provide support in case of attack.
Andrew Birley: In the period we're interested
in at Vindolanda, we have very much a front
line unit.
The Fourth Cohort of Gauls are first contact
soldiers.
Narrator: They have to be tough.
Because they are venturing north of the wall.
And war with the local population, the Celts,
is very real.
Narrator: When Roman legions first conquered
Britain, the heavily equipped and superbly
organized Roman army routed their Celtic
adversaries.
But, over 150 years later,
the fighting continues.
And no one is going anywhere.
Simon Esmonde Cleary: The Romans have a very
clear view that once a people,
once a territory are conquered,
then they stay conquered.
And that for Rome to give up conquered
territory is a terrible disgrace.
Narrator: Fully 10 percent of Rome's
300,000 troops are concentrated in tiny
Britain, trying to keep the locals in line.
Andrew Birley: And where they did manage
to contact the enemy the results were
savage.
And you don't get any better evidence than
what I'm holding in my hands right now,
the human remains of a victim of that
conflict, a victim of the war.
From the side of the Scottish borders,
the tribes north of Hadrian's Wall outside
the empire.
He's been killed very, very violently.
We can see both sides of his skull here have
been bashed in.
His head had been severed from the rest
of his body.
And if we look just under the upper jaw
here, we can see a hole has been placed in
there, and we think that's evidence of his
head actually being mounted on a spike on
the ramparts as a warning to the native
population.
Narrator: It's a violent time.
And not just for soldiers.
Celtic women and children can be bought
as slaves.
And brought back to Vindolanda.
They are considered not as humans,
but as property.
And the healthier the better.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: No slaves were known in
Britain before the Romans arrived and by
the time you get to 210 they are very much a
fact of life.
Families would have expected to have slaves.
Narrator: Slaves have few rights.
But they do have value.
If someone killed a favored slave of the
commander, the consequences would
be dire.
Andrew Birley: Discipline was
incredibly strict within the Roman army,
depending on the crime, the punishment could be
very, very severe: including death.
You could be exported from the province in
chains.
Narrator: Certainly, there is plenty of
motive to hide a crime.
But to solve it, we still need to know a
lot more.
Let's start with whether our child is a
boy or a girl.
Trudi Buck: We tell the sex of individuals in
adults mainly from the pelvis and from
features of the skull.
Obviously, we don't have the skull.
And the pelvis in the child of this age is
still in three separate sections and hasn't
developed the, the sort of the specific shapes
and features that we would use in adulthood.
These start to develop around puberty,
which this child probably hadn't started yet.
Narrator: The sex of the victim is
impossible to determine.
But we may be able to find out where our
child is from.
At Durham University England,
Andrew Millard begins to extract minute
amounts of pure enamel from the teeth of our
child.
And also from the teeth of five cows from the
same era and location, as a control.
The process will take days.
But together they should tell us if the
victim is considered barbarian or Roman.
A child in 213 A.D.
on the Empire's frontier.
Perhaps the son of an army blacksmith growing
up south of the Wall, or a young Celtic girl,
living further to the north.
It's just as possible that the boy or girl is
the child of a soldier, the same army that may
have produced the killer: may also guard
the father.
Maybe this is a death in the family.
Narrator: No matter what the time and place:
children are still children.
But life is not easy for anybody in
Vindolanda.
Simon Esmonde Cleary: Childhood is a very
dangerous time for the Romans,
many of them die when they are still very
young.
And so this has led some people to think
that the Romans didn't really care much about
them.
But this tombstone here,
I think gives the lie to that idea.
It shows a little girl holding a ball in her
hands, and below we have an inscription.
It's been paid for by her father, Sudrenus,
who calls her by her pet name, Urtiola.
This child mattered to them.
They really felt very bitterly and mourned,
and wanted to have commemorated so that
other people would know that she had existed.
Narrator: But not every Roman soldier is
quietly living with a stable family.
Local taverns are centers of drinking
bouts, prostitution and extensive gambling with
dice and board games.
"Little Soldiers," a game very much like
checkers, is popular with the troops.
And they bet heavily on the winner.
Andrew Birley: Gambling and gaming seem to be
almost endemic and we find evidence right
across the sites.
We will find gaming counters, dice,
the tools of gambling in the bathhouse.
We'll find them in the toilet block.
On the ramparts when they are supposed to be
doing sentry duty.
Narrator: But not everyone gambles fairly.
At Vindolanda, excavators have found
loaded dice.
Could our victim be the child of a merchant in
town: killed as revenge for their father's
cheating?
But if so, why is the child buried inside the
fort?
Why not just take the corpse outside and hide
it in the woods?
Andrew Birley: I'm outside the mighty
walls of Vindolanda here,
huge thick stone walls.
And these would be up to 14 to 16 feet high
when they're up to their full height.
But also you've got to remember there'd be
Roman soldiers patrolling on the top
constantly on the lookout, on duty.
And there's no way on earth you'd get
anything from out here in there,
or in there out here, without a Roman soldier
seeing what you're doing.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: Carrying the dead body
of a child through a fort as busy as
Vindolanda would have been a very dangerous
thing to do.
The fact that the child is buried under the
floor of a room suggests that that
child died in that room.
Narrator: So we can deduce where the boy or
girl probably died.
But can modern forensics tell where
the child might be from?
The tooth samples are ready.
Now Dr. Geoff Nowell extracts pure strontium
from our child's enamel.
Strontium is an element that is contained in
most rocks.
Two forms, 86 and slightly heavier 87,
vary according to local geology.
We can identify a particular area by the
ratio between them.
By eating food and drinking water,
people's bodies create a geological strontium
signature of where they have lived and died.
After peeling one electron off each atom,
Nowell injects 150 billionths of a gram,
less than six 100-billionths of an
ounce, into a mass spectrometer.
The machine is basically like a race
track with a curve in it.
At one end is the sample of strontium.
On the curve is a powerful magnet.
A click of the mouse, and the strontium
leaves the starting gate at
150,000 miles per hour.
Over one and a half billion ions per
second, racing along like thoroughbreds.
The magnet forces the lighter strontium 86 to
swing wide.
The heavier strontium 87 hugs the inner rail.
So detectors at the end can distinguish between
the 86 and 87 as they cross the finish line.
Geoff Nowell: The results are coming in,
the strontium isotope ratio is about
point 7099, that's significantly lower
than what we would expect for the local
biosphere strontium isotope composition.
So it's certainly possible that this
child came from another area,
not the local area, but what we really need now
is the oxygen isotope to confirm that.
Narrator: Down the hall,
Dr. Darren Gröeke performs a similar
analysis of oxygen, extracted from the
enamel samples.
The further away from the equator,
the higher the ratio of light oxygen ions.
So Gröeke can measure the latitude of where
the child originated.
And the results are soon clear.
Darren Gröeke: The significance of the
results that we've got so far from the samples
that we have which are cow and the child
suggest that they have a different isotopic
composition between those two groups.
And so therefore, our initial interpretation
would be that the child is not from Vindolanda
and possibly not even from Britain.
Narrator: In fact, our child could be from
southwest France, Spain, or even Italy.
Trudi Buck: The results also tell us that the
child moved to Vindolanda fairly
recently within say the last three to five
years of their life, which again is really
interesting.
Andrew Birley: This is massive.
One of the commanding officers of the fort,
the guy called Petronius Herbicus,
was from Umbria in Italy.
Are we possibly dealing with not just a member
of the military community of
Vindolanda, but a member of the family or
extended family of the commanding officer
himself?
Narrator: There are many possibilities.
With all the evidence at hand,
now is the time to return to Vindolanda
for the true detective work.
Narrator: Dr. John Hunter,
a forensic archaeologist and advisor to police
homicide departments, joins the investigation.
John Hunter: Tell me what we're walking onto now.
Andrew Birley: Here we're walking down the
little street to the two barracks,
and the barrack that really interests us,
or the barrack room is this one here, John.
John Hunter: I see.
Andrew Birley: And if we just walk along the
wall here we can peer into the gravesite.
Narrator: Hunter is concerned that the body
may have been in place before the barrack
building was even constructed.
John Hunter: Yes, now I've got to ask that,
this rather irregular line of stones,
that's the foundation, is it, for this?
Andrew Birley: That's the foundation,
that's right, yeah.
John Hunter: It's not an earlier building?
Andrew Birley: No, no.
John Hunter: You're absolutely positive?
Andrew Birley: I'm 150 percent positive.
John Hunter: They all look like that,
do they?
Andrew Birley: Yes.
John Hunter: The questions you want to
ask for a forensic scenario are very
difficult to answer, if you have to go back
2,000 years.
That said, archaeology is all
about interpretation, isn't it?
Andrew Birley: Absolutely.
John Hunter: So is there any way this
could've been misinterpreted?
Andrew Birley: I don't think so, no.
I'm absolutely confident that our
grave or burial took place sometime between
213 thereabouts, and 230 A.D.
John Hunter: If we take that as fact for the
time being, let's just look at the context
right down at the bottom.
If we take your plan.
Narrator: And the investigation raises
other questions.
Could an individual soldier have taken
advantage of a deserted barracks to hide his
crime?
Simon Esmonde Cleary: A fort like
Vindolanda is often seen as being occupied
by an entire unit.
But, what we increasingly realize is
that it's just a fortified base for the
unit.
It might be all there, it might be half there.
Very little of it might be there,
depending on what the military needs were.
Narrator: Roman troops are constantly being
used away from their home base,
to help with road construction,
guard the Roman governor of Britain,
or help other units with rebellious locals.
So the room could have been empty.
But there is another factor.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: There's going to be a
bit of smell coming up eventually when the
body starts to rot.
So, it's very interesting that the
body was still there to be found.
Narrator: Was there collusion among the
eight soldiers who occupied the room?
Andrew Birley: They quite literally refer
to each other as my dearest brother,
my dearest soul, you get this whole sense of
family inside those units,
and inside the contubernium.
I think it'd be very, very difficult to pull
the wool over the eyes of the rest of your
mess mates.
These guys are so close they'd be able to read
each other very quickly.
Narrator: It's a confusing situation.
A child that comes from far away to the
distant, cold north of England.
A burial that is all wrong.
So what did happen?
Our experts combine three unique areas of
knowledge, forensics, archaeology and
criminal investigation.
The fact is we will never know exactly what
happened to our child.
But what do our experts think might have
happened?
Simon Esmonde Cleary: A soldier to Vindolanda
garrison has a child slave.
One day, he loses his temper and gives them a
really good beating.
Only it's too good a beating and the child dies.
Now the soldier knows that even though Roman
law regarded slaves as rather like domestic
appliances with a soul, it was illegal to kill
a slave.
He needs to get rid of the body.
So at night to benefit from the cover of
darkness, he takes it to another barrack
room, which is unoccupied,
and he knows that the men who usually live in
it are away on patrol on Hadrian's Wall.
Having got rid of the child's body in a room
which is not likely to be linked to him,
he gets out of the barrack room and
returns to his own.
Trudi Buck: A seven-year-old child is
sold in a slave market in the southwest region
of France where they've grown up.
And they're bought by a centurion who is then
promptly posted to the northern frontier of
Britain to Vindolanda.
As the child goes up the alleyways between
the buildings, she hears some soldiers chatting
about something they're maybe not supposed to
be chatting about.
These soldiers have been pilfering from the
stores.
They can't risk being found out.
One of them takes something, maybe a jug,
hits the child over the head,
killing him instantaneously.
The child is just reported as another
runaway slave.
And the perpetrators of the crime go
unpunished.
Lindsay Allason-Jones: The child is playing
outside the barrack block having come from
outside, the civil settlement,
into the fort looking for adventure.
He's enticed inside one of the barrack block
rooms by two men.
Soldiers.
They then bind the child intending child
abuse.
Something goes wrong, the child is smothered.
Panic sets in.
They are stuck with this child's body.
They need to get rid of it quickly.
They bury the child underneath one of the
flagstones.
Questions will be asked eventually but,
the child has just disappeared and the
soldiers get away with it.
Andrew Birley: This child is a well-loved
member of the community,
the son or daughter of the soldiers who live
in that barrack room.
A group of three soldiers, after
partying hard after a long day's work come
home to their barrack block.
And the father asks his daughter or son to go
and fetch something.
They don't fetch it immediately.
And the father lashes out,
striking the child.
And unfortunately the child falls.
And the child's head hits the wall.
And the child is killed.
This is an act of unpremeditated
violence, an accident in many ways.
And what do they do?
Well, they cover for each other.
They bury the evidence under the floor,
fully intending to move the body at the first
opportunity.
And so for the next couple of days,
search parties go out, particularly made up of
the men living in that contubernium,
living in that room, searching the
surrounding countryside, the woods,
trying to find where this child has gone.
But, of course, they know that the search is
in vain.
But nobody else does.
And the memory of their crime follows them for
the rest of their days.
Narrator: But maybe the Fourth Cohort of Gauls
are not the culprits at all.
John Hunter sees another possibility.
A traveling merchant could easily gain
access to Vindolanda.
John Hunter: A child taken, abducted,
murdered, buried hurriedly,
perpetrator vanishes, that would be my
scenario.
It's an easy thing to do.
Communication in Roman times a lot slower than
it is in modern times.
No telephones, no fast cars,
you vanish into the sunset, job done.
Narrator: The mystery of how and why our
child was hidden under a barrack room floor at
Vindolanda 1,800 years ago remains exactly that.
A mystery.
But our search for an answer is an honor to a
young boy or girl who died long ago.