Beachy Head Lady was young sub-Saharan Roman with good teeth, say archaeologists

Culture 24 ^ | March 28, 2014 | Ben Miller

[SunkenCiv]

...The facial reconstruction was done by Caroline Wilkinson from Dundee University, one of the country’s foremost reconstructors... Caroline said, ‘oh my, you realise you’ve got a sub-Saharan African here?’

Our osteo hadn’t picked that up, but Caroline subsequently had it looked at by two more experts who agreed, without being prompted, that this individual showed so many traits of being a sub-Saharan African person...

The radiocarbon dating came back with a firm Roman date – around 200 or 250 AD. That was a relief. It’s not without precedent to find Africans from this date in Britain, such as the famous African bangle lady in York.

It was very rare and unusual, nonetheless. She’s sub-Saharan African – she’s not North African, which was part of the Roman Empire, so she’s beyond the Roman Empire, to the south.

We still couldn’t really say anything, because we were waiting to get the radio-isotope analysis back. We still didn’t actually know where she came from.

It said Beachy Head on there but we could find no evidence that she was from that area at all. She could have been from a Victorian collector who just said she was from Beachy Head. She could have been an African skeleton from Africa...

But it came back as south-east England origin.

Even more intriguingly, she seems to be someone from the Eastbourne area, Roman, with very firm sub-Saharan ancestry. Whether that means that she’s first generation we don’t know. She could possibly have been born in Africa and brought over here at a very young age, but it’s just as likely that she was born here.

[colorado tanker]

I wonder what happened to her descendants when the Legions left and the Saxons started visiting?

[ZULU]

She looks more like a mixed race Berber than a black African.

[SunkenCiv]

and a little like Ali McGraw.