2,000-Year-Old Durotriges Tribe Discovery in Dorset Unveils Possible Human Sacrifice Ritual

Arkeonews ^ | 2 November 2025 | oguz kayra

[fidelis]

Archaeologists from Bournemouth University have uncovered the remains of a teenage girl buried face down in a pit in Dorset, southern England—an extraordinary discovery that may point to one of Britain’s earliest recorded cases of human sacrifice. The burial, dated to around 2,000 years ago, sheds new light on the ritual practices of the Iron Age Durotriges tribe, who inhabited the region long before the Roman conquest.

The skeleton, discovered during ongoing excavations at an Iron Age settlement, was found without grave goods and in a position that deviates sharply from normal burial customs of the time. Researchers believe her hands may have been bound before death. Such treatment of the body, archaeologists suggest, could indicate a violent or ceremonial death rather than a traditional burial.

“This appears to be the execution of a person carried out in a very theatrical manner,” said Dr. Miles Russell, Principal Academic in Prehistoric and Roman Archaeology at Bournemouth University. Russell leads the university’s long-term Durotriges Project, which has spent over a decade studying the pre-Roman communities of southern Britain. He added that the posture and context of the burial point toward an intentional act of punishment or sacrifice.

Evidence of Ritual Killing
So far, the Dorset site has yielded three face-down burials, each belonging to young women. One, discovered in 2010, showed signs of a cut throat, and another—found in 2024—displayed evidence of trauma to the arms and torso. Such a pattern raises disturbing questions: Were women specifically targeted for ritual execution? And what social or spiritual beliefs justified such acts?

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TOPICS: History; Society
KEYWORDS: ancientautopsies; archeology; britain; dorset; durotriges; godsgravesglyphs; humansacrifice; ironage; unitedkingdom

[fidelis]

Go back far enough, and virtually all societies have engaged in human sacrifice and probably cannibalism too. For some the practice survived into more recent times until it was stopped by others who had been stopped themselves or somehow gotten past it in an earlier time.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

Go back far enough, and virtually all societies have engaged in human sacrifice and probably cannibalism too.

True.

But there also were such a thing as serial killers in the past as well.

Generally with human sacrifice there is a great deal of ritual about the burial as well as the death.

Face down in the midden does not seem to fit this kind of ritual at all but we know so little about how they thought as they lacked a written language.

[jimtorr]

Two Thousand years ago is Roman times. The Roman sources, as far as I know, do not reference human sacrifice in SW England, where the Durotriges Tribe was located.

The SW Britannic tribes of the time did have a written language, although, as far as I know, they did not use it much. It may have been Gaulish, Greek or even Latin.

[SunkenCiv]

[Empire_of_Liberty]

It sounds like “honor killing”, to me.

It strikes me that we have to “guess” at the actions of our ancestors. We don’t pretend to understand their culture, at all.

There also seems to be a great tendency to assume religious ceremony in everything. All collections of stones are altars, as if people had no other purpose to gather.

[SunkenCiv]

Roman conquest of Britain started in AD 43 (Emperor Claudius), with Wales finished up in AD 77.

The Scots were in Ireland until a century or so after the Roman Empire left Britain; the tribes of Caledonia weren’t too much for the Romans to handle, there just wasn’t anything of value there, and demands for military force on the continent was more common.

These conditions led to the construction of an earlier barrier apparently following the approximate route of Hadrian’s Wall but in turf and timber. The Antonine Wall was a later turf-and-timber barrier farther north.

[imabadboy99]

what a bunch of BS. She was buried face down! That must mean they were practicing human sacrifice! Utter BS and wild conjecture.

[Democrat = party of treason]

Godless liberals have been murdering children for a long, long time.

[Red Badger]

Maybe she was buried alive and she turned her body face down to avoid being hit in the face with the dirt...............

[ladyrustic]

Or maybe she had the plague and when she was rolled into the hole no one could be bothered to adjust her face down posture.

[Red Badger]

Quite possible..............

[ZOOKER]

Maybe they were witches.

[Red Badger]

Another possibility!.............

[Ruy Dias de Bivar]

I had an elderly woman tell me of one of her kin who married a Jewish girl who was later murdered. She said they went to the Jewish funeral and the dead girl was in the casket face down.
Again her words not mine.