A new study has found the graves of dozens of early British kings, queens, princes and princesses from the era of the mythical King Arthur.
It suggests that British royal graves dating from between the fifth and the seventh centuries A.D. have been overlooked because they weren't elaborate and didn't have any valuable grave goods.
Between the end of Roman rule and the late Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, there was a period of British history that was often described as King Arthur's time.
Ken Dark, a professor of archaeology and history at the University of Reading in the United Kingdom, has just published a new study that identifies up to 65 graves of post-Roman British kings and their families in 20 burial sites across the west of England and Wales.
There are 8 truly dysfunctional royal families.
After the end of Roman rule in Britain in the early fifth century, the British continued to rule in the west of England, Wales, and parts of Scotland.
The Christian British may have viewed the burials of the Anglo-Saxon rulers as pagan.
The British seemed to have buried their royalty without grave goods in simple graves without stone inscriptions alongside the graves of common Chistians, although many of the royal graves were enclosed by a rectangular ditch and probably surrounded by a fence that has since rotted away, he said.
Dark is the author of a study that was published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Antiquaries of Ireland.
He told Live Science that the royal graves are standardized and have some variation.
The Roman rule in Britain lasted until about A.D. 410, when the last Roman troops were recalled to France. Julius Caesar invaded southern Britain in 55 B.C. and 54 B.C., but he didn't establish permanent Roman rule.
The Christian British ruled what are now western England and Wales from the fifth to the seventh century. The pagan Germanic tribes of the Angles, Saxons and Jutes invaded and settled in the eastern parts of the country.
The legends of King Arthur, who was supposedly British and Christian, are set in this time period. Dark suggests that a real person or a fictional hero of that name was famous as early as the sixth century, because of his previous studies that suggest a sudden spike in the use of the name among British and Irish royals.
Dark began his investigation to address a long-standing archaeological mystery: while many British kings were known to have lived during this time period, almost none of their graves had ever been found.
Who will inherit the British throne?
Until this study, the burial of a British king from this era was not known until he was found in the northwest of Wales and an inscription on his gravestone said he was a king.
Cadfan may have retired from the kingship to become a monk before he died, and the wording of the inscription suggests his grave was being commemorated because of his status as a monk, Dark said.
There are at least nine graves of rulers from the period found, including one at the famous ship-burial near the east coast of England.
To get to the bottom of the mystery, Dark reviewed the archaeological work done at thousands of burial sites from this period in the west of Britain and Ireland.
His study suggests that the British royal graves were placed within early Christian cemeteries, and while they were marked out as those of high-status people, they seem very humble compared to ornate pagan graves and none have stones with inscriptions stating who was buried there.
The outer enclosures can be up to four feet across and up to 30 feet long.
There are a lot of burials that are all the same, and a few of them are marked out as being of higher status than the others.
There are five British royal graves in an early Christian cemetery that are thought to be at the site of a fortified peninsula on the coast of Cornwall that has been associated with post-Roman British royalty and legends of King Arthur. He said that Irish royal graves are also covered with mounds calledferta. Both the ancient Irish and British were Celtic and had similar languages.
The burial style of Christians in late Roman Britain appears to be the one where the royal graves are placed at the center of the enclosure.
He said that the enclosed grave tradition comes from the late Roman burial practices.
Archeologists were expecting royal burials to be covered by mounds of earth or marked with inscriptions on stone because the enclosed graves were thought to hold people of a high social status.
It was originally published on Live Science.
All Rights Reserved © 2024
