The gruesome truth behind a 2,000-year-old massacre revealed
Gangland executions of dozens of people 2,000 years ago were wrongly blamed on Romans, a study has found.
A mass burial site containing 62 skeletons was found at Maiden Castle in Dorset in 1936 and attributed to a brutal massacre by pillaging Romans.
But researchers at Bournmouth University used modern dating techniques to study the bones and found the victims suffered violent deaths before the Romans landed on English soil, disproving the longstanding belief that the massacre was part of their ruthless invasion.
Instead, modern evidence paints a picture of revenge, bloodthirsty executions and tumultuous politics.
Miles Russell, the current dig director, said: 'We can now say quite categorically that these individuals died a long time before the Romans arrived and over a long period of time, not in a single battle for a hill fort.
'The deaths were a series of gangland-style executions. People were dragged up there and put to death as a way of one group exerting control over another.
'These were Mafia-like families. Game of Throne-like barons with one dynasty wiping out another to control trade links and protection rackets for power. What we are seeing is the people who lost out being executed.'
The skeletons themselves bore marks of savage ferocity. Most, Mr Russell said, have smashed skulls with no defensive wounds.
'They were repeatedly struck with a sword to the head with the skulls smashed to oblivion,' he added.
'You are talking overkill, not a single death blow. These were gangland executions carried out in a very prominent and obvious way as a warning to others.'
The researchers believe the now debunked theory was accepted as truth because it was espoused by Sir Mortimer Wheeler, who led excavations at the site in the 1930s, and resonated with public fear of a potential invasion from the Nazis.
The majority of this violence was at the start of the first century AD, the scientists found, which they say reveals rising social tensions in the decades preceding the Roman invasion in 43AD.
'In associating the cemetery with a Roman attack, Sir Mortimer Wheeler missed an intriguing proposition, namely that the individuals derived from different, though no less dramatic, forms of violence enacted in the final years of the pre-Roman Iron Age,' the scientists write in their paper.
'Whether this related to raiding, dispute resolution or dynastic conflict, it is clear that those interred in the east gate died in episodic periods of bloodshed which may have been the result of localised social turmoil.
'Ironically, perhaps, it would appear that acts of interpersonal Iron Age violence ended within a generation or so following the formal establishment of a Roman province in the mid first century AD.'
The study is published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
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