Human Sacrifice in Ancient Britain

Roman views on Celtic sacrifice

0:00Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe.

0:30Sacrificing animals to the gods was a common feature of ancient cultures. Classical writers claim the Celtic peoples of Western Europe went further, that they sacrificed humans. But the religious rites of ancient Britain remain a mystery. Without written evidence from the Britons themselves, we don't know exactly what they thought their sacred duties were and what value they placed on human life.

Introducing Dr Myles Russell

0:57Archaeology can help to fill gaps in the written record. And today, I'm joined by my good old friend, Dr. Myles Russell from Bournemouth University to take on a contentious question. Did the people of Iron Age Britain and Ireland really sacrifice humans to their gods? Or have our ancestors been horribly misrepresented? Miles, always great to see you. Welcome to the show.

1:32Thank you. First, I've got to say, you've just come off your latest dig, loving the beard. Very much an archaeology vibe I'm getting straight away. More sort of Robinson Crusoe, I think. But shall we also mention your T-shirt? You've got Duotrigas. Yes, Duotrigas. So what is that? I'm officially branded. Yes, yeah. So our Duotrigas project over the last 17 years has been looking at the understanding of the Iron Age tribe just prior to the Romans arriving. So the Duotrigas have got a very distinctive cultural impact with their burials, with their settlement types.

2:02So we're just trying to understand what happens when the Romans arrive and how Roman did they become? The answer is not at all. And also, no doubt we're going to be covering them in our chat today about human sacrifice.

Classical sources and the Wicker Man

2:14Because this is the thing now. It's so difficult sometimes to see something that's clearly human sacrifice in the surviving archaeological record. But you get those interesting insights into what may well have been human sacrifice in the Iron Age from Britain. You do. I mean, lots of Roman writers describe the Britons as performing lots of acts of human sacrifice. And a lot of the time, I guess, we've looked at those classical sources and thought they are just demonising an enemy. This kind of negative propaganda that anyone puts out.

2:45You don't want your opponents to sound like nice guys. So they commit acts of human sacrifice as well as painting themselves blue. Cannibalism and stuff like that. Cannibalism, marrying their sisters and sticking horse urine in their hair. All this kind of stuff that the Britons, you know, we're told do, that makes them alien, outlandish and odd and clearly sort of barbaric. So there's lots of descriptions. Julius Caesar, in particular, when he's describing the Gauls of northern France and the Britons, talks about human sacrifice.

3:16And the fact that this shows that these barbarians, their religions are so primitive and crude. And that's what the Romans need to stamp out. You know, they need to bring their idea of civilisation to these poor, benighted natives who are committing all kinds of atrocities upon themselves. But finding archaeological evidence for that is very difficult. Is this also where we get the idea of a wicker man from? Yeah, I mean, that's really thanks to Caesar. He describes, I think, one particular tribe as the way of getting rid of criminals is having a mass sacrifice where they pack men and women into this sort of big wicker work figure and then ignite it and just burn people alive.

3:54So we don't know whether this is something that Caesar saw or whether he heard of or whether it even happened. But it's one of those sort of big mass sacrifice activities that the Romans, I mean, I think partly is to titillate their own audience. You know, they entertain a Roman audience thinking, oh, you know, this is the kind of wanton atrocities that these barbarians commit. So we don't know whether that's true. There's certainly no archaeological evidence that's been discovered yet of a wicker man. But it's one of those deep-seated things that we think of when we hear about human sacrifice.

4:25And the Romans really like that idea. There are several writers. Caesar's just the first who mentions, kind of, infers that they had these great kind of wooden things that they send set alight with people within. Yes, and that fact that it's the Druids, it's some kind of priestly class within the Gauls of the Germans, even the Spaniards, we're told, that have human sacrifice. Every different tribe has its own curious way, whether it's burning or whether it's stabbing somebody in the throat and then watching their limbs contort, or whether it's hanging or drowning.

4:56But there are all these various different ways in which, I mean, it's usually some aspect of cutting open and looking at the entrails. And what I find, not so particularly wonderful, but what I find really interesting is that the Romans are very keen to say, this is horrific. Killing people for religion is bad. But the Romans, of course, commit mass atrocities for entertainment. You know, you think of gladiators, you think of the kind of people being ripped alive by panthers or being burnt alive.

5:25Crucifixion, you know, thinks of the tens of thousands that the Romans regularly crucify. As a public statement, as warning, they would view that as execution, right? They're not doing it to the gods. And I think that's the key thing, is that their feeling is killing somebody to appease gods is wrong. That's the wrong kind of god. That's the wrong kind of activity. But killing people for entertainment, that's fine. Yes, human sacrifice versus public execution, you know, midday during an event at the amphitheatre, the arena in the Roman world.

5:57What's good, what's right and what's not? I mean, as a matter of scale, I don't want to defend human sacrifice. But if you are killing one person in an event to the gods, surely that's preferable than killing thousands in front of a baying mob. But the Romans don't see it that way. They've got their own sort of curious of cultural blindness as far as that's concerned. They think that killing for religion is something that should be outlawed, should be stamped on and removed.

Archaeological evidence in Britain

6:22Going on to the archaeology to figure out whether there actually was any human sacrifice or not in Britain, whether it's an invention by the Romans to smear them.

6:33Archaeologically, how difficult is it to look at human remains and to say clearly, this is evidence of human sacrifice? Well, what complicates it in Britain is the fact there's actually relatively few individuals make it into the burial record. So there are some areas like the Giotrigas of Dorset, areas in eastern Yorkshire where you get large inhumation burials, as we would reckon. So skeletons complete, and you can look at injuries sustained on that person. But for the vast part of late Iron Age Britain, we don't get that quantity of skeletal remains.

7:06So you'd say about 99% of the population are not appearing in the archaeological record. So perhaps they're being cremated. Perhaps there's some kind of exposure burial. Perhaps they're being placed in rivers or bogs or somewhere where archaeologists can't recover those remains. So straight away, we're not getting anything like a complete burial record. So finding people who have been sacrificed is very difficult. We do find individuals who have sustained injuries. Sometimes these are put down to war cemeteries or battle graves.

7:38There's a number of hill forts in the southern part of Britain, like Danebury that Barry Cunliffe excavated in the 1970s and 80s, and Maiden Castle that Mortimer and Tessa Wheeler excavated in the 1930s. And there are some skeletons that have major cranial trauma. But it's difficult to say, are these executions, are these people who've died in single combat, are they sacrifices? So it is very, very difficult. I think the best evidence that we've got, it's fairly limited in Britain, but across Ireland into southern Scandinavia is the so-called bog bodies,

8:12where you get very well-preserved individuals. And it's very clear that these have been killed in a way, it's not simple execution, but there's some kind of performative act that's been conducted on these people. Well, let's explore the bog bodies first of all, and then we'll delve into some particular burials that might also show evidence of sacrifice that you've been working on.

Liminal spaces and watery graves

8:34And bogs, first of all, give us a bit of an idea, Myles. What area of the world are we talking about where you see lots of bogs? Why are they so prevalent in a place like Britain? Well, any prevalent in certain areas where you've sort of got restricted sort of water flow, where you get sort of very boggy deposits. If you think of these as sort of liminal spaces where people aren't essentially living, but they are going to perhaps to extract iron or they're extracting peat. But these are, I think, when we're looking at in the late Iron Age, it's watery places, it's rivers and bogs, which form the edge of specific territories.

9:10And it's in these places that you often find prestigious objects. You think of the River Thames, some of our best examples of late Iron Age metalwork have come from the Thames because they've been effectively sacrificed there. The Iron Age communities have thrown ceremonial shields and swords and helmets. It might be that the water is perceived to be a portal to another world. If you believe your gods inhabit the ground and the waters, then by dropping something into the river, it's lost. It's entered the realm of the divine. So I think straight away, there's something special about those kind of environments.

9:45And it's intriguing when we look at certainly the settlements that we've been digging in Dorset. It's very clear that these people don't eat fish. They don't eat anything from the sea or from the rivers. That's not in their diet at all. The Romans love shellfish. The Romans love all kinds of things from marine resources. Iron Age people don't. And it might be if you're dropping your dead or your special object, if you think your deities reside in the river, you do not eat what comes out of the river. And I think bogs also occupy that kind of liminal strange space in which deities are there.

10:17You can place things in a bog. It gets swallowed up. It gets lost. The divine, your gods have taken control of that object, be it a person, an animal, or some kind of prestigious artefact. It's been claimed. If you leave it on a mountain, you can still see it's there. But if it goes into the water, it's gone. It's gone. So I think there's that sense that watery spaces are very, very special. And that's where we find our best examples of sacrificed objects, animals and people. I guess it's also interesting with bogs, the fact, I remember talking to Melanie Giles about this last year,

10:51the fact that almost like rivers where you can see the flow, you can see movement happening in the rivers. So you get a sense of almost life in this liminal zone. Bogs aren't stationary things. They grow. They take more of the environment as time goes on. So people living near a bog will be able to see it, you know, grow and bubble is probably the wrong word. But, you know, I mean, it also looks like it's alive as well. It is alive, yeah, in a way that sort of the Chalkland or sort of another arable area isn't. Crops grow from it, but the ground itself is static.

11:23Well, you're right, the bog, sometimes it's in a sense you can see it breathing because it's a real feeling that it is alive. And so do we think this is something that stems all the way back from the early Iron Age, dare I say, the Bronze Age before that these places have been important, liminal zones? I think, yeah, you certainly do get quite a lot of Bronze Age metalwork from watery places as well. But I think in the Iron Age, certainly we're getting towards the later Iron Age, the importance of these, it might be that if a river is at the border of a territory, by dropping things into it, you are somehow increasing the spiritual nature of that barrier.

11:59You are the protection zone from your own environment. Of course, the water's bringing you, you know, the actual waters of life and so on. But I think there's this feeling that as you go into the late Iron Age, bogs, rivers, even the sea are becoming far more important in a spiritual sense. And the examples we have surviving from bogs of human bodies from the late Iron Age, do we have a lot of examples surviving from Britain and Ireland? Quite a few from Ireland, lots from Denmark and southern Scandinavia. Of course, the most famous one from England is Lindale Man, covered from Cheshire.

12:30He's one of a small limited number of bog bodies. Of course, the great thing about a bog deposit as anaerobic conditions, you don't get organics decaying to the same degree as elsewhere. So you do get skin, you get flesh, you get textiles, you get a whole range of organic preservation that you don't get. So we do get complete sort of leathery bodies coming out. But most have been recovered through peat digging. So they're not being recovered through careful archaeological examination.

13:03So a lot of bog bodies recovered, they're incomplete because they've been hit by spades or they've been hit by sort of machinery. So Lindale Man is a classic example. We're missing his lower half. So we don't know where that's gone. But the upper half as well preserved gives us a very clear idea of this individual, but also the mode in which he was killed.

Lindow Man and ritual death

13:23Shall we explore that now?

Lindow Man and ritual death

13:24So Lindale Man's the most famous one, and he also might have a link to human sacrifice. So tell us about this figure of Lindale Man, what we know from his remains. The key thing is we've got an individual who seems to be well looked after. He's got nicely sort of trimmed fingernails. He's got nicely looked after hair. He seems to be relatively well fed. He's died violently. This is not a simple case of murder or execution. He's died what some describe as a three or, in his case, probably a fourfold death in that he's naked.

13:56I mean, all the bog bodies has recovered across whole northwestern Europe seem to be naked as they've gone into the bog. One or two have got a cap. Some have got a little bit of sort of some kind of fur and scarf or something or arm ring. But essentially, their clothes have been removed from them. They've probably been walked alive into the bog. It's very, very difficult to drag a dead body into a bog to deposit. So they've probably been marched into the bog knowing that they're going to die. Of course, we don't know whether they've accepted that or whether they've gone struggling.

14:26But then with Lindale Man, someone seems to have struck him violently across the head. So his skull's been fractured and part of the bone has sort of gone into the brain case. He's then had his throat cut and he's been garroted. That seems a bit overkill. But there is a real sort of sense, if you're killing somebody, and I'll give you ideas, Tristan, but if you're killing someone and trying to do it in a theatrical way, you want to make the blood spurt further. So his throat's been cut, but the actual application of a ligature and a tourniquet, it tightens the neck.

15:00It makes the blood spurt further. And Melanie Giles, as you mentioned now, has described very viscerally the way in which that kind of death excites an audience. Because it's that sense of, you're not seeing somebody die, but they're doing it in the most explosive way imaginable, the most theatrical way. So someone's tightening this from behind, creating this massive area of blood flow. Then he's being placed face down into the bog. And he's probably still alive at this stage because they were finding a lot of water in the lungs.

15:33So there's a suggestion that not only is he being concussed, he's had his throat cut, he's been strangled, and then he's finally been drowned. So that might be, if you've got four types of death, you've got four people involved in the killing. But it's a real over-the-top way of executing somebody, arguably in front of an audience, to make it viscerally exciting, but also to sort of demonstrate that this person is definitely dead. Gosh, and you can imagine, as horrific as it is, probably ritual meaning behind each stage of that killing.

16:10You know, there's very much a process behind it. There is. And also, of course, we don't know who that person was within their community. I was going to ask that, yeah. Were they a priest? Were they a leader? Were they somebody from a neighbouring community who's somehow considered less important? Were they a prisoner? Yes, it could be a prisoner of war. There's been some suggestion in his stomach cakes. He's got relatively simple sort of oat cakes, but there's also traces of mistletoe, which there's some suggestion, certainly with the Scandinavian bog bodies, that they've been fed ergot, which is this fungal growth on crops, which creates this kind of psychological imbalance.

16:48It's a very psychoactive drug. So these are people who might be, and that might be the case with a mistletoe, that there's some sense of altering their mind state before they're sacrificed. That might be considered a kindness because they're not wholly in control of their senses. They don't quite know where they are. It might be that by altering their mindset, you're making, you know, it might be seen that they're making greater contact with their gods because of that altered state. They're seeing different, hallucinating. They're seeing, so they're entering into that kind of world of the divine.

17:21But there is a sense that these are people who've been walked into the bog. They've been fed drugs and then they're killed in a very overly dramatic way. But is that a punishment or is that, you know, have these people gone willingly to their death? And that sounds like an odd thing to say. Why would you go willingly to that kind of violent death in that kind of exposed liminal space? But we don't know what their views about the afterlife was. I mean, I feel like they're being sacrificed. And we think of obviously early Christian martyrs who willingly went to the most extreme kind of torture and death in the belief that that kind of violence led them to a glorious afterlife.

18:00It's the afterlife that they were searching for. They wanted to die in a more extreme way than Jesus had done on the cross. So I think we've got lots and lots of examples of people who willingly go to death in the belief it's a good thing. Bloody Mary and obviously the burnings, of course, in the Tudor period as well. Yes, exactly. So it might well be that these individuals like Lindau man went willing to his death in the sense that his life, giving of his life, was good for his people. In some way, he was appeasing the gods.

18:30We know, I don't know, it might have been a case of some kind of environmental collapse, a failure of a harvest. It might even be the arrival of the Romans because he's dying at a time that the Romans are starting to possibly be investing in southern Britain. But it could be that there was no struggle that he voluntarily gave himself up to this kind of death. We just don't know. It's lots of interesting questions and debates, but we shouldn't necessarily assume that these are criminals being punished. They might be willingly offering their lives in the hope that this brings a better existence to those people left behind.

19:05It's an amazing story, though, from the surviving archaeological evidence of Lindau man. As you've mentioned mistletoe in the stomach, I mean, that does make you think, is it a druid who organised it? Because the Romans do associate mistletoe with druids, if I'm correct. They do, and Julius Caesar and others are very keen to link the mistletoe as some kind of special material that the druids create. The difficulty with the druids is lots of speculation, lots of fiction has been written about them. We know that there is a priestly class in one part of central France called the druids.

19:40Undoubtedly, there would have been priests and priestesses who were engaged in sacrifice, who were making the contact with the gods. So it could be, I don't want to say, you know, say with mistletoe, oh, that definitely proves there's a druidic connection. This is somebody who, this might be a druid himself. We don't know. Obviously, someone knows how to kill this person, is doing it in a certain way. They've done it before. They've undoubtedly been doing it again. But, yeah, the mistletoe there might be a way of dulling the pain or introducing some kind of mind-altering substance that makes the death less painful to the individual involved.

20:18So, Miles, I've got a couple of others on my list before we get to your work at the Dua Trugas. The biggest name that I recognise here, and I think, is he on display at the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin?

Irish bog bodies and torture

20:31Old Crochen Man. Yes, one of those things about human, I mean, it's another aspect about the human burials, is the display element. Is that there is a sort of a feeling that, you know, should we be putting these figures on display? I have to say that they are probably the most exciting things for people. Not everyone's going to be affected the same way, and I think you do need some kind of trigger alert if you're showing human remains. But you're right. With Crochen Man, we've got an individual there. He's missing the head and lower part of his torso because, again, the way that he was recovered through peat digging.

21:02But it is another individual that seems to have suffered torture prior to death. And what do we know about this torture? Do we think it could be evidence of sacrifice? Yeah. I mean, I think with Old Crochen Man, indeed, a lot of the other burials from Central Ireland, is that these are individuals who have been sacrificed. I mean, Crochen Man seems to have his nipples removed as another element, perhaps, of torture prior to death. So they're instigating pain. Now, is that because he is a criminal and you're trying to make him suffer before he's executed?

21:34Or is it all part of this process of introducing different aspects which aren't necessarily fatal, but ultimately contribute to the ultimate demise?

21:46I think this is also the thing, isn't it, that because we've got some examples that might suggest human sacrifice for some of these bog bodies, we can't then just say that every body you find in the bog is a result of a ritualistic killing, which may well be human sacrifice. Many other times, actually sometimes, I remember talking to Melanie about this, they might have just fallen in the bog and not got out. Exactly. I mean, bogs are dangerous places. So we could have a number of individuals who've just fallen in and have drowned and have been lost. And there's no way you can recover that body. So it only comes later with doing peat digging.

22:18But I think a lot of the examples that we're finding archaeologically, because they show evidence of trauma on the body. I mean, things like with Old Crochen Man with his nipples being removed with a knife. You wouldn't find that if you were just dealing with a skeleton. You know, you'd be looking for trauma on the bone. So finding the flesh, finding the skin of these individuals, you can see if they've been tortured, if they've been forced to be shaved, if they've had ears cut off. All these sort of elements we can see if you've got the body preserved as they are within the bog context.

22:51I'll just read out the other two I have on my list because I want to get on. But just because they're highlighted as well, we've also got Galachman between 400 and 200 BC, probably strangled. Withy was found around his neck, maybe a garrote. This interesting, two wooden pegs pinned him down, which is quite something. There is that sort of sense of when garrotting, strangulation does seem to be. I mean, that makes, I think, the death last longer. But less blood in that case. There is less blood in that. But if you're, yeah, I mean, that particular example, there doesn't seem to have been a throat cut.

23:23But it's the cutting of the throat and the strangulation that seems to be a fairly common feature, certainly in the Denmark burials. And this last one, this is of a woman, Balimacum's Moor Woman, from about 343 BC to 1 AD CE, around that time. Her remains, she was decapitated at the bog and her head was taken away. But that almost sounds like, once again, she was led into the bog alive and it happened there. But in that case, maybe a different tradition is that we don't know the context around it. But then her head is taken away and the rest is kept in the bog.

23:55The removal of the head, I mean, that's an interesting story in its own way, because you see a lot of, in early medieval Christianity, certainly in Wales, there's lots of martyrs and saints who have their heads removed. And that's the origin of a sacred spring. So it might be going back to that idea of head hunting. We know, again, from Roman writers, that the taking of the head, that sense of a person's identity as a kind of, as a prestigious object is relatively common. So it could be there, it's less of a sense of a sacrifice. Again, we don't know whether this is a punishment, but the head being retained and taken somewhere else.

24:30But here's another good example of someone being led into the bog, knowing full well the fate that is reserved for them. So those are a few examples from peat bogs in Britain and Ireland.

Hillforts and southern burials

24:57But I mean, that's only kind of, so it's from, it's the northern part of Britain and Ireland where you have the peat bogs. It's less so in southern Britain, but there is still, there is still potential evidence of human sacrifice and remains discovered in southern Britain as well. And these are from both hill forts and everyday settlements, do you think? Yeah, I mean, it does get very difficult when you're dealing, certainly with areas where you don't normally get a huge numbers of skeletal evidence. But you can often tell when you're getting the actual bones, whether an individual has suffered a particular trauma, usually to the skull.

25:31You can see there's a definite blow there or to the shoulders, to the arms, whether these are defensive injuries, someone's faced their attacker, or whether these are somebody who has been executed. And then the actual subsequent treatment, so somewhere like Dainbury, and there's a number of hill forts across the sort of central southern Britain, there are pits with heads in, sometimes with the still, the jaw and a few vertebrae suggesting forcible, you know, actual decapitation as a cause of death, rather than the head being removed in a post-mortem sense and curated later.

26:02You get individuals who've died violently, who've been thrown in a pit. You sometimes get evidence of sort of sword or spear blows to the head. It does get difficult to be sure in those kind of circumstances, whether you are looking at individuals who've died fighting. This might be an honoured ancestor or someone who sort of died an heroic death facing an enemy combatant and therefore has been treated with ceremonial burial rather than somebody who's been dragged there and then sacrificed and then killed. So a lot of the times we can say this person has died with violence, but we can't say what the cause of that violence is.

26:39With the bog, we can say they've been taken a long way from the area of settlement and then they've been done to death. So this is a premeditated theatrical execution. But if you're dealing with a skeleton in a grave in a hill fort and they've died violently, it's difficult to know whether that is, they've died in the circumstances of normal life or whether they've been executed or sacrificed or whatever. So usually it's the kind of context that that body is found in. If that's unusual, that in turn might suggest it is a sacrifice. Well, I was going to ask, what's the context of these skeletons discovered at Dainbury Hillfort?

27:12So should we be imagining, were they found within the confines of the ramparts or were they found outside the hill fort? Give us a sense of that. So a lot of the burial remains there are found in what appears to be disused storage pits. So if we think of a big cylindrical pit cut down into the chalk, which may have been used as a grain silo, it may have been used as a cold storage for food. When that's gone out of use, what you often find is that animal remains, so sacrificed animals, animal body parts have been thrown into the pit.

27:44And in some cases we get skulls with cranial trauma. Sometimes you get bits of jaws. Sometimes you get complete individuals that are thrown in. And it's that sense of this isn't a formal burial, as we'd understand it, if somebody laid sort of lovingly within a grave with grave goods. There's a feeling that the actual throwing into the pit or the dismemberment of the body that suggests this is an execution or this is a sacrifice. It's not a grieving family looking after the remains or sending the remains of a loved one off into the afterlife.

28:15This is the disposal of somebody in a very dramatic and violent way. And are there any particular examples from Dainbury that people have thought this is more likely than any others to be potentially a result of human sacrifice? I mean, there are. I mean, the problem is there's no single pattern to everything. So you get some pits where you've got a selection of skulls in. Sometimes you get individuals who've been, as I say, sort of sharing a grave or sharing a pit and it looks like they've been thrown in. So are these people who are captured enemies who've been executed?

28:46Are they people who have died defending the site? Are they criminals? There are, you know, there's lots of different speculation, but we can say that violence and the treatment of the body afterwards suggest that this is not a normal burial, that these are not honoured, respected ancestors, that they've died for a particular reason. And then they've been disposed or perhaps in a storage pit rather than in a grave because it's a sacrifice to the gods. I think that's all we can say, isn't it? Yes, yeah. That's all we can say. But let's go on to a site where you have done a lot, a lot of work and we can focus on a few particular discoveries made and the evidence supporting that these figures were sacrificed.

29:29So let us introduce the site of Duropolis.

The Durotriges project at Duropolis

29:33Now, Miles, would you care to take it away?

29:37Sometimes I regret using the term Duropolis. Seven minutes for this, by the way. It condensed 17 years and five minutes. It's a big Iron Age, late Iron Age settlement with some sort of evidence of Roman activity coming in as well, which we've been investigating at Winterbourne, Kingston in Dorset. It's part of the Duotrigas project looking at the way in which the late Iron Age tribe of the Duotrigas, do they become Roman? What actually happens when the Romans arrive? So we've had roundhouses, we've had storage pits, we've had cemeteries, we've had a whole range of evidence coming up.

30:07I mean, the key interest that we've had is the cemeteries, because these are people who are burying their dead in a particular way with grave goods. And so we're getting quite a nice percentage of the population. We can study things like age at death, disease, health, what they're eating and so on. However, within that context, we've also found at least five individuals who aren't buried in that very safe, respectable, usual way, as if they're being placed in the ground for their journey to the afterlife.

30:38These are people who are found at the bottom of storage pits, usually face down as if they've been thrown in. And it's these individuals who we are suspecting are human sacrifices. And before we delve into that, I mean, explain just how special it is to have a cemetery surviving with multiple human burials surviving from late Iron Age Britain. Yeah, I mean, it sounds odd to say you assume that there's cemeteries all over the country. But within Iron Age Britain, it is actually relatively rare to get a large cemetery whereby you're getting men and women and children buried.

31:11In Dorset, in eastern Yorkshire, there are cultural groups who, for whatever reason, decide that they are going to dispose their dead in individual graves in larger cemeteries. The rest of the country, they might be cremating their dead. They're doing something unusual with human remains and we don't get the skeletal evidence. So we're very, very restricted in those sort of areas where we can actually study the human population. And Dorset is one such zone. So we've, over the last 17 years, we've excavated at least six cemeteries of late Iron Age date in which men and women in equal numbers are being buried.

31:50And they've got grave goods. They've got joints of meat. They've got pots containing drinks. So we don't know much about the gods that they worship, but there's a clear sense there's life after death. And they're being given the necessary prerequisites for that journey, food and drink to sustain them on that journey to another world. So that's great. But that really relates to, I guess, to the elite, the wealthy, the well-off, the generally successful farmers. But finding individuals face down in storage pits tells us a completely different aspect to that lifestyle.

32:26That's really interesting. And how many did you say potentially? Five? So we've got five individuals. Four look like they've been thrown in. So arms and legs are all disjointed as they've been faced down. One is faced down, but appears to be that the legs are drawn up under the body. They might have been bound up and then thrown in. But four definite, five possible. Shall we go through them one by one and kind of explore what we know from the archaeology?

The Winterbourne Woman discovery

32:48The first one I've got is the Winterbourne Woman. Yes. I mean, that's the one we've managed to publish. That's what we found in 2010. So it's one of the first storage pit burials that we recovered. And to that date, we'd had one cemetery with all these sort of individuals buried carefully and respectfully with grave goods. This was a storage pit. Now, every other one of the storage pits that we find, we excavate because pretty much everyone has got some kind of placed deposit. There's this feeling, I guess, that in the Iron Age, you dig a pit, you put your foodstuffs in it.

33:21The next agricultural cycle, that pit gets abandoned, but you put an offering. Sometimes that offering might be... You throw someone in there. Well, not every time. I think there's a way of getting through your population quite quickly if you did that. But sometimes it's an inverted pot. Sometimes it's a dog burial. We've got a few of those. Sometimes we get bits of animals which are cut up. So we get bits of horse, bits of cow in the bottom of the pits. So there's a feeling that animals are being sacrificed and they're not being eaten, but the meat's being consigned to the bottom of the pit as an offering. But in 2010, we found going down into one of these pits, there was an adult female.

33:57She was lying face down. So it's completely unlike the other graves that we'd had, which are in crouched or fetal positions, lying on one side with their legs drawn up in a shallow grave. She was face down as if she'd been thrown into the pit. And she was lying on what we thought at the time was a bed of meat. It was sort of like a mass of horse, cow, pig bones, very weathered bones. So these weren't freshly killed animals. This was bone relating to animals that had been killed some time ago. The bone was very weathered, creating a platform at the bottom. And she was lying face down on top of that.

34:29So straight away, we knew that was odd. We hadn't found anything like that before. And there was something deeply suspicious about the nature of that deposit, the nature of those remains. It wasn't until we excavated and removed her did we see, looking at the remains, that there was a series of injuries on the body. One, a very violent break across her ribs. So just before, a couple of weeks before she died, she'd had a significant bloat of her chest, which had cracked one rib, which was starting to heal and had bruised other ones.

35:00She had an injury to the head, but most critically of all, she had a massive cut to one of the neck vertebra. So what actually looked like is the only way that could have happened if someone was holding her from behind and had run a sort of a blade, a deep incision across the neck. And effectively cut her arteries in the neck. So just like with the bog bodies, here was somebody who'd had their throat cut. We can't obviously tell whether she had a ligature applied as we linned our man to make a more theatrical blood spurting.

35:33There was three or four kind of levels to the killing almost, right? But here is someone, and what the intriguing thing is, because having had that throat cut, which would have introduced a lot of blood into the pit, she's then thrown face first onto this white platform of bone, of animals that had long since died. So it might be a sense of the transfer of the life essence of the human into the animal bone or her life essence as a sort of the blood draining out into the ground. If you believe your gods are in the ground and they control the fertility of your crops, then the giving of a life in that very public and theatrical way into the bottom of the pit is probably the best way from that perspective of appeasing your gods.

36:15So it could be an agriculturally linked kind of ritual ceremony. It could be. I mean, we don't know enough about the actual time that she was killed, but it could be if there is crop failure or there's some kind of catastrophe with food procurement, you think the gods are angry, you give the life of a human. It's an extreme sacrifice. We know they're sacrificing animals all the time. We're getting pits and pretty much every single cut that we excavate has got animal body parts in. So they're killing animals to eat, but they're also giving offerings to the ground all the time.

36:45But every so often, presumably, something extreme is needed to keep the gods on board. And I think this is an instance of that. Do we have any idea? Has there been studies of the bones themselves to find out more about who this woman was? Yeah. I mean, since we've done lots of DNA analysis of all the cemetery, all the burials we've got, this individual is not connected to any of the other burials that we've got. She's not family as far as that set. I mean, she might be connected to somebody in a nearby farmstead, but they don't appear to be killing one of their own.

37:18Looking at the sort of mobility isotopes, looking at the whole range of stuff, evidence in the teeth and so on, it looks like she didn't grow up on the chalk. We're digging primarily on the chalk. So she's not connected to the family that lived there. She's probably not growing up in a geological environment that's close to the settlement. So effectively, I think she's an outsider and it's not making it better, but I think she could be a captive. She could be a prisoner. She's certainly very maltreated. You know, she's quite malnourished. She's got a series of injuries and said the most recent one being the rib damage before she's then killed at the pit.

37:53So she's somebody who might be the lower end of the socioeconomic scale. She might in some way be thought to be more disposable, which is a terrible thing to say about anyone. But within the community, they might have felt if we were going to sacrifice somebody, she's the one we're going to sacrifice. She's also got, when we look at her vertebra, they're very, very compressed. So she's carrying lots of heavy weights through a lot of her life. So I think all these things together suggest that she's probably a slave. She might well be a prisoner of war, but for whatever reason, at whatever time they've decided we are going to kill someone, make a human or sacrifice, she's the one to kill.

38:32I guess it's also very interesting when you explore the wider context of new research that has come out from your site in the past year or so. I remember going down there last year, we did a documentary on this very topic, the fact that it seems that the men are moving in to the settlement, they're moving in with their wives, and it seems that they're matrilocal societies in which it's easier for women to, well, lands being passed down their side of the family. So I guess it's horrific as it is to say, it makes sense that they're not sacrificing one of their own women because they're one of the landowners of the society.

39:08They hold quite a bit of power, so they're not one of the ones being sacrificed and then thrown in the pit. Yeah, no, exactly. I mean, obviously the study's still in its early days, but it does, as you say, with Laura Cassidy and our colleagues at Dublin University looking at the DNA, it does look as if we've got individuals, certainly women, who are staying on the land. There are multiple generations of women being born, grown up and died and being buried there. The men seem to be further distant and less connected to the women. The women have more grave goods with them.

39:38So there is a real sense of it being a matrifocal, a matrilineal society, land ownership passing down the female line. And a lot of the times you look at the roundhouses that they're living in, you look at the settlements they've got, you look at the landscape and you think, this is some kind of utopia. This is a fantastic lifestyle. We recognise a lot of their hopes and dreams. And then you see something like this, human sacrifice, and you think, actually, no, they're very different. There are certain aspects of their life, their attitude to life, their outlook on existence that is totally different for us.

40:11And they think it's perfectly acceptable in certain conditions to kill somebody and throw them in the pit. And that's fine. But as you say, she's not one of them. So I don't know whether that's good or not. They're not killing their own, but they certainly deem it perfectly acceptable to kill someone who's considered to be an outsider. Yeah, I don't think we need to see whether it's good or not. No, no. But I think it's interesting to theorise in that society whether one of those women landowners, you know, had power, could have also been a spiritual leader, you know, a druid. We know it was men and women who could have then been overseeing this ritual, this ceremony that might be an example of sacrifice in that case.

40:47Exactly. I mean, it's one of those things, certainly with the bog bodies, we never know whether the individuals who are buried, are they one of the communities being killed or is it a prisoner of war, someone distant? With these skeletons, we can say that this is somebody who's not part of that community. But who's doing the killing, whether it's part of the, you know, the women who are in control there who's killing somebody, perhaps not to pollute their own kind of genetic makeup. We don't know, but it's a very, and people said, well, can you say it's a sacrifice?

41:17It's definitely an execution. But I think the fact that this is someone who has been killed in this obviously theatrical over-the-top way, but there's a lot of thought has gone into actually creating that bone platform. When you look at the bones she was thrown down on top of, it's not a random scatter. At one end of the pit, they've got the skulls of horse and cow. Then you've got the vertebra and ribs and pelvis. There's some kind of order that's been created. So there's a lot of thought has been gone to how we're going to create the theatre within which this individual will be killed.

41:51So in that sense, I think it's probably one of the best examples we've got out of a wetland context of obvious human sacrifice.

42:13And are the other four potential examples of human sacrifice at Duopolis, at the site, are they very similar in how they're laid out in the burials? They are in the sense of being thrown into the pit. We had one three years ago now, an adult male, who very clearly had been thrown in because one of his legs was up against the side wall of the pit and the foot was at the top. And he was lying with his arms, you could imagine, they almost see where he'd been killed and where he'd been thrown into.

42:45So you would have found the foot first when you were digging down on those two. Yes, yeah, yeah, exactly. So they found the upper levels of the feet and they had to work down and to find him. So, I mean, that's one of those other things that sort of brings you up short because as archaeologists, we're finding skeletons all the time. But these are people who've died somewhere, have just been taken somewhere else and have been buried and you should get a sense of care and decency. Here we're actually dealing with a murder victim and we can identify the place where they were murdered. You can see they were obviously killed here at the top of the pit and thrown in.

43:19And that does bring a whole new perspective and it does make you feel quite, you know, you're dealing with a crime scene effectively. You're never going to work out who the perpetrator was, but you can see the victim and you can see how they were killed and you can see where they were killed. But that particular man, he was thrown in. There were a few animal bones underneath him, but nothing like the platform, the first lady. There was no obvious trauma that we could see on the skeleton. But the fact that he was lying face down suggested a violent death.

43:52And to be honest, again, it's a lot of the bog bodies, the way they've had their throats cut and been strangled. It doesn't leave an impact on the bone. So there's plenty of ways he could have been killed without it then impacting on his skeleton. And that's in contrast to the bog bodies where you had that skin surviving. So you can see the evidence of the garroting and stuff. Yeah, I mean, if he'd been garroted, and you said with the bog bodies, often they're found with the noose still with them. Yes, Tolland's man is another good example. If he'd been strangled, that would have decayed in the chalky dry soils as well.

44:22So he wouldn't have the evidence. But it's the fact that it's the nature of that throwing into the pit. That's very disrespectful, given that everyone else is buried in nice shallow graves with grave goods and there's an order to it. The fact that he's thrown in suggests a disregard for the individual. And I suspect that he probably died on the surface. And we had one last year, again, this was an adult female, who also was thrown in and the body, the limbs are tangled. So I think she is another good example of a sacrifice. It's interesting that of those five, it is men and women, clearly.

44:55It's almost like there's no kind of gender focus on these girls. Yeah, yeah. So it doesn't seem to be, neither does it seem to be an age focus. I mean, what we're doing at the moment, obviously, the one we had in 2010 was quite early on in our studies. The other four that we've recovered, we're also now doing the DNA and the analysis of those to see, again, are these outsiders? Are they connected to each other? Is there anything we can say about their lives? Because all of our lives are dietary choices and injuries are written in our bone. We might, for the first time, be able to bring up a sort of a biography of the sacrificed.

45:29You know, what is it distinctive about these individuals and their lifestyles that made them different? Are they undergoing a harsher lifestyle, a different kind of diet to those who are in control? This is something we can do for the first time. And that's research you're doing at the moment. It is. And hoping to reveal soon the results of it. Yeah. Right. You're teasing us, basically. I have to get you back on for a future one. But yes, I guess we'll now, well, actually, one more question before the big why part. Does it seem like, I know because the organic material doesn't survive in those burials, but as you say, it's a crime scene.

46:06It seems to be almost, you know where they're killed, you know where they're thrown into the pit. Should we also be imagining that their hands are tied behind their back almost? Yeah, the first burial that we had, had her arms underneath her and they were crossed. The wrists were touching. So I suspect her hands were tied. The second one I described had his arms in front as if he'd been thrown in and perhaps was still alive. And his arms had gone off defensively to protect him in the fall. But the other ones had all their hands behind them.

46:36And again, they were crossed. So they were tied. And I think that also suggests an element of being fought, you know, being killed, going to an unwilling death. So these aren't people who have been drugged potentially with the bog bodies and know what's in store for them and are going perhaps to their death willingly, even though it's violent. These individuals do seem to be bound at the point of death. So there's less likely that they are happily, willingly going towards this fate. But this is, that's a great example to point there because it shows that for all the times we've compared the examples like Lindelman and the Winterborn woman, you need to be careful at the same time because they're clear differences.

47:19The actual, how far we can compare the two environments when exploring human sacrifice in Britain. Yes, I mean, all we can say is that these are individuals who have died with violence. They are sacrifices, but the context is very, very different. So I think in the, with the bogs, because it feels like it's such a liminal space that the gods are physically residing there. They're being walked there and then killed. Whereas in the hill forts and the banjo enclosures and all the other sort of sites we've been looking at on the Chalkland, these might be killed within the settlement zone.

47:52So there's a very different element to the death, even though we can say that, you know, they are being killed for whatever reason to appease the gods.

Theories behind ancient human sacrifice

48:01So Mars, we've covered all these different potential examples of human sacrifice in bogs, hill forts, in everyday settlements.

48:10I want to ask again in kind of this more focused question of why, what are the theories behind why people in late Iron Age Britain would want to sacrifice people? I mean, the difficulty is, of course, they didn't write anything down. So we can't see into their minds as to what is going on here. And we have to rely to some extent on Roman writers, Julius Caesar, when he's describing the executions of criminals. He talks about people who are being put to death for various immoral aspects.

48:40You know, judging by Julius Caesar, it seems bizarre because everything he does is pretty immoral. But he doesn't give us, none of the Roman writers give us any reason as to why they felt these people were being killed. But they do sort of imply there is a criminal aspect to it. It's not the taking of a leader or a priest or someone important. It is the lower class or someone who's gone against the wider community. So, I mean, it could be that is an element of it because the Romans are very good with making death a public event as a warning to others.

49:17So even people dying in the arena, it was done for entertainment. But it was also from the point of view of saying these people have transgressed the law or they fought against Rome. This is the punishment. If you step out of line, this will happen to you. And crucifixion is part of that. I mean, it's essentially a mode of death that's reserved for slaves or people who had some kind of uprising. But it's you're nailing somebody to a cross and they die and their bodies are left there. So it's like the gibbet in medieval Britain. It's a sense of this body is a continual warning to not step out of line.

49:49It could be that a lot of the Iron Age burials that we see, certainly the ones in the pits, if they've got their throats cut, if it's done in a theatrical way in front of an audience, it could be this is a warning. This person has broken the law, has done something bad. We're killing. Everyone has to watch it. And there's a sense of if you step out of line, this will be you. But then is that sacrifice or is that more just the punishment? Yeah, I mean, it's sacrifice in the sense that it's a theatrical killing in a pre-measured way that they're actually doing it.

50:20And the creation of a platform. There is a what stage does an execution become a sacrifice? If you're doing it to appease the gods, if you're killing somebody as a punishment, but also to keep the gods happy, then it is a sacrifice. I think it's the theatrical element. It's the overkill element that makes something a sacrifice rather than necessarily a punishment execution. But it is a very thin line between the two. And certainly the Romans were very clear cut that all the people they killed, it was for punishment rather than as a way of making the gods happy.

50:55What about the context in which they are killed? Because from what you've been saying, it seems a bog is a more prestigious place to be executed, to be sacrificed than thrown in, quite frankly, thrown in headfirst in a storage pitch. Yes. Yes. I mean, I guess if you think your gods reside in the bog, if the bog is a living space, then perhaps, I don't know, would anyone be happy to go to their death in that way? But if you feel that the gods inhabit that space, then you are going immediately to join them. Yes. So however severe the mode of death, it's going to be painful, but it will be relatively quick.

51:33If you're drugged with ergot or mistletoe, then perhaps elements of that pain will be minimised, but you're being placed in an environment where the gods reside. So you're joining them instantly. So there might be that sense that you are much like the, you know, we said earlier about the Christian martyrs who feel that the manner of their death makes them go instantly into their afterlife. You don't, yes, you might be worried about the pain element, but once that's done, you've proved yourself and, you know, your afterlife is secure. Whereas with a storage pit, you're being thrown in with the remains of animals, decaying animals, right?

52:06Which feels less, quite frankly. That does seem less respectful. I mean, it seems bizarre to say, respectful ways of killing somebody. But there is a sense of the ultimate disposal, you're in a storage pit. And yes, okay, it's going down into the ground where the gods may inhabit, but generally speaking, those pits are filled with rubbish. So there is a sense within the bog, you are being claimed by the divine, whereas in the pit, you're just being thrown in with the rubbish. So there might be a sense that that is a far less respectful, which again, might possibly tie into the fact that these individuals had their wrists bound because they did not want to go happily into that world.

52:45Yes, compared to the ones we have from the bog bodies, where to our knowledge, there's no evidence of wrists being browned. Not as far as I'm aware of, no. So there is a sense that, I mean, it might be that they were so drugged up, they didn't realise what was happening to them. But it could easily be that, yeah, they were, that feeling that you are joining your deities straight. You've got that instant link with the afterlife, with the other world, which you don't have in the Chalkland storage pits. And we talked about bogs and hill forts and settlements.

53:14I guess this is theory as well, if we don't have the evidence surviving, but could we imagine similar activities happening on the sides of rivers or on the coastline, but that evidence just doesn't survive? No, it doesn't. I mean, that's the trouble. Once a body's been inserted into a river, it will break down. There's been quite a lot of skulls brought out from the Thames and from the Walbrook, which may be from bodies that have been buried but have been disturbed by the water. But it's quite possible that what we're looking at are individuals who've been killed and have been thrown into that watery space. So their shields, swords, spears, which thrown in, will get recovered and we'll go, well, this is a votive ritual object, clearly.

53:51But human remains, bodies thrown in, will break down and will very unlikely to be recovered. So there could be a large numbers of people, more than in the bogs, who are being killed and are being placed directly in the river and therefore being seen to be claimed by the river gods. But we will never recover them archaeologically. So that's the frustration that we've already highlighted with the surviving evidence we have. And overarchingly, can we see any emerging pattern as to the types of figures that seem to have been, like, seems plausible that they were sacrificed, whether it was in a place like Duopolis or in a peat bog?

54:31I mean, as far as we can see in the peat bogs, the bodies, because they're far, well, better preserved, there is a sense that these, to some extent, are individuals who aren't engaged in hard labour. So with Lindau Man and some of the Irish examples, as it's been explained, they've got really nice, looked after fingernails. They don't appear to have done any kind of hard labour. Their hands are uncalloused. So it could be what we're seeing there are the sense of a priestly elite or perhaps a ruling elite. There's been a suggestion that in some of the Irish ones, these might be kings.

55:05It might be the idea of when you come to the end of your rule, you are sacrificed for the greater good. Whereas the individuals that we've been looking at from the storage pits in Dorset seem to be at the lower end of the scale. These are people who are engaged in hard labour, who are considered to be more disposable. So the sacrifice there, it might just be the giving of a human life. And it's better, from their perspective, to kill someone who is of less significance. Whereas in the bogs, we're seeing people who are of great significance, who are being consigned to the bogs.

55:36So it might be different levels of society, different forms of death, different forms of sacrifice. That's an interesting theory. I mean, with the people in the bogs, whether they reach an old age and they're almost kind of passing the torch on to the next generation. And rather than living out their days, they have this end. I mean, do we have any idea whether many of these peat bog burials, they're older people? Well, they seem, I mean, define old in the Iron Age. I mean, they seem to be within that sort of age of late 20s to perhaps early 40s.

56:07Okay, I wasn't thinking that, but okay, yeah. But given the life expectancy of the time, that might be considered quite good. You're sort of cutting the rose in full bloom rather than letting somebody degenerate into later life. So there might be a sense of, you're in your prime, that's the good time to go, rather than wait for a later period. But whether, I mean, there has been a suggestion that these are perhaps members of Iron Age royalty. And that's part of the deal. You rule, but in the knowledge that you are later going to join the gods in that kind of violent, dramatic way.

56:41So you can't have one sense without the other. You can't have the power without the sign off at the end. Well, this has been so fascinating. I think I'm running out of questions to ask because we've covered quite a lot. I think I'm going to leave it with one last thing I have in front of me, which is a couple of views on human sacrifice from Roman authors. Not actually in Britain, but it'd be good to get your thoughts on this as well as whether we can apply it to the British context. So this is, first of all, an extract from Julius Caesar talking about the Gauls, an extract from the Gallic Wars in the mid-first century BC.

57:14And he says, The Gauls believe that the execution of those who have been caught in the act of theft or robbery or some crime is more pleasing to the immortal gods. But when the supply of such fails, they resort to the execution of the innocent. So that's an interesting one first. And the second one is from Tacitus in his Germania. So it's about in Germany. It says, Punishments vary in Germany according to the nature of the crime. Traitors and deserters are hung upon trees. Cowards, dastards and those guilty of unnatural practices are suffocated in mud under a wicker fence.

57:48This difference of punishment has in view the principle that villainy should be exposed while it is punished, but turpitude concealed. The difficulty, as all things, with individuals like Caesar is that he's not like a modern anthropologist. He's the first one. He's the first. Yeah, yeah, yeah. With all those accounts in the sense of all Roman writers, they're not modern anthropologists sort of living with a community, understanding them, trying to understand their practices. So I think there's a lot of things like the face down in the bogs, that kind of stuff.

58:19These are actual accounts of things that have happened, but the reasons for which they are happening aren't necessarily the right ones. So I think the punishment idea, that is certainly something that is eminently plausible, but we don't know how much of a Roman spin has been added to that to try and explain it. Because Caesar and other writers like Tacitus and so on, they're not overly concerned with getting their facts right. They present evidence, but essentially they're writing to a Roman audience. They're entertaining that audience. They're trying to remind their Roman colleagues how barbaric and odd these people are.

58:53So the practices, like we said earlier about Caesar and the Wicker Man, or the execution of criminals and then innocents, and then placed down in the bog, they're explaining these or describing them, but they're not really giving you the full set of evidence because they weren't aware of it. They don't really care that much. But that's all we've got. So it would be more interesting to think if all human sacrifices at the time were punishments, but they don't always seem to be. The bog bodies are being a case in point that we've got people there who seem to be at the upper end of society.

59:28So what are they doing that's considered worthy of punishment?

59:34Big question, isn't it? But certainly the whole thing is the giving of a life. It's not something that happens all the time. We're not dealing with industrial levels of human killing. They're very good at killing animals and giving those kind of lives. But every so often, and the key point is, what is it in society? What is it in the natural world, the environment, that means the giving of the human life is the important thing? It doesn't happen all the time, but it does happen. And we're trying to understand by looking at the skeleton, the body remains. This person involved, the person at the end of that being sacrificed, does that explain the nature of the killing itself?

1:00:10Why is it being done? What is the need for it? That's something we're still a long way from answering, but we're getting closer. Do you think we ever will answer that question? I think given the more examples of sacrifice that we get, given the battery of scientific analysis that we can now do on the bodies, looking at ancestry, looking at connections, looking at dietary evidence, all these sort of things give us a better picture of the sacrificed. So the building up of that database, I think, in a couple of years' time, we'll have enough, really, to have a better idea of the kinds of people who are being killed, the ways in which they're being killed, and that might help us to understand better that aspect of Iron Age society.

1:00:49Well, we'll get you back on the show when that happens, my friend, to learn more about this. But in the meantime, it's been so interesting, and it just goes for me to say thank you so much for taking the time, Miles, to come on the show. Thank you for having me.

Outro and subscription details

1:01:04Thanks so much for joining us on The Ancients today. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And if you are loving The Ancients, then why not become a History Hit subscriber? As a subscriber, you will have access to hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a new release every week, plus early access and ad-free podcasts. You can sign up at historyhit.com slash subscribe. See you in the next episode.