MICHELLE STARR16 APRIL 2019
An archaeological survey in Oxfordshire, England has produced another macabre mystery: 26 ancient skeletons in burial pits, suspected to be around 3,000 years old, dating back to the Iron Age before the Roman occupation of Britain.

What makes the find even more intriguing is evidence suggesting the pits were used for ritual burials.

The chthonic spaces of the British Isles are riddled with so much human history that there is legislation requiring archaeological assessment prior to major spatial works.

These remains were discovered prior to a project by Thames Water, which is laying a pipeline to protect Letcombe Brook, a rare and valuable chalk stream.

"The new Thames Water pipeline provided us with an opportunity to examine a number of previously unknown archaeological sites," said Neil Holbrook of Cotswold Archaeology.

"The Iron Age site at Childrey Warren was particularly fascinating as it provided a glimpse into the beliefs and superstitions of people living in Oxfordshire before the Roman conquest. Evidence elsewhere suggests that burials in pits might have involved human sacrifice."

More
https://www.sciencealert.com/dozens-of-neolithic-human-sacrifice-victims-have-been-found-in-england

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Did the Celts or Druids Perform Human Sacrifice?

Here’s the short answer: yes, the Celts do appear to have performed human sacrifice as part of their religious rituals. And, since the Druids were the religious/scholar/priestly social class, they almost certainly would have participated in human sacrifices, and probably officiated at them.

We have three sorts of data regarding Celtic human sacrifices. We have the words of Classical Greek and Roman writers, usually with a political agenda, and often reporting hearsay (Strabo for instance, was repeating the observations of the earlier no longer extant author Poseidonius), we have a few references in medieval Irish texts, primarily in the mythological tales, and we have archaeological data that is increasingly important.

First, here are some extracts about human sacrifice among the Celts from two Classical authors.

According to Strabo (64/63 B.C.E. – 21 C.E. at least) in his Geography (4.1.13):

And for all your informative posts. I click on your posts more than any other, and I know others do the same.

Does every single article about the United States - no matter what subject - discuss slavery?

Aren't you remotely interested in what we might learn from Aztec culture - good and bad? No intellectual curiosity at all?

This article is more than 4 years old

A new BBC documentary tells how a trove of documents lays bare the names of Britain’s 46,000 slave owners, including relatives of Gladstone and Orwell

David Olusoga

Sat 11 Jul 2015 19.04 EDTLast modified on Wed 1 Jul 2020 13.12 EDT



A print shows African captives being taken on board a slave ship. Photograph: Print Collector/Getty

The past has a disconcerting habit of bursting, uninvited and unwelcome, into the present. This year history gate-crashed modern America in the form of a 150-year-old document: a few sheets of paper that compelled Hollywood actor Ben Affleck to issue a public apology and forced the highly regarded US public service broadcaster PBS to launch an internal investigation.

The document, which emerged during the production of Finding Your Roots, a celebrity genealogy show, is neither unique nor unusual. It is one of thousands that record the primal wound of the American republic – slavery. It lists the names of 24 slaves, men and women, who in 1858 were owned by Benjamin L Cole, Affleck’s great-great-great-grandfather. When this uncomfortable fact came to light, Affleck asked the show’s producers to conceal his family’s links to slavery. Internal emails discussing the programme were later published by WikiLeaks, forcing Affleck to admit in a Facebook post: “I didn’t want any television show about my family to include a guy who owned slaves. I was embarrassed.”

It was precisely because slaves were reduced to property that they appear so regularly in historic documents, both in the US and in Britain. As property, slaves were listed in plantation accounts and itemised in inventories. They were recorded for tax reasons and detailed alongside other transferable goods on the pages of thousands of wills. Few historical documents cut to the reality of slavery more than lists of names written alongside monetary values. It is now almost two decades since I had my first encounter with British plantation records, and I still feel a surge of emotion when I come across entries for slave children who, at only a few months old, have been ascribed a value in sterling; the sale of children and the separation of families was among the most bitterly resented aspects of an inhuman system.

Slavery resurfaces in America regularly. The disadvantage and discrimination that disfigures the lives and limits the life chances of so many African-Americans is the bitter legacy of the slave system and the racism that underwrote and outlasted it. Britain, by contrast, has been far more successful at covering up its slave-owning and slave-trading past. Whereas the cotton plantations of the American south were established on the soil of the continental United States, British slavery took place 3,000 miles away in the Caribbean.

More:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed

sacrifice.

In Christian Europe, cleanliness became far from Godliness.

"Cardinal Jiménez de Cisneros, himself a Franciscan - wrote Ford - persuaded King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella to close and abolish the Moorish baths after their conquest of Granada. They forbade not only the Christians but the Moors from using anything but holy water. Fire, not water, became the grand element of inquisitorial purification."
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"During the Inquisition, one of the worst things that could be said about Jews as well as Moors was that they were ‘known to bathe.’ "

But in England, France, and Germany (and my guess in many other places too), people bathed as often as they could. For poorer people, that might include relatively infrequent baths (every few weeks), but for better-off people, weekly baths were common, and the very well off could afford to bath several times a week. Most people wore clean inner garments every few days. Outer garments were washed on an as-needed basis.

The main issue in Medieval cities was poor sewage control, and thus why cholera outbreaks were frequent in cities. The record is full of efforts of city officials trying to avoid public random dumping of feces, but the infrastructure to support it was.... poor. Never-the-less, there is plenty of evidence (archaeological and documentary) of public privies and bathhouses. Laundry services were a common business even in very small towns. In the country, however, even poorer houses would have their own outhouses and/or cesspits.

Medieval people's oral hygeine was better than you might expect. They didn't eat much sugar, and suffered less tooth decay than their descendants. They frequently chewed mint and other herbs to freshen their breath.

I remember an old black and white comedy, Danny Kaye I think, as the king's physician in France. He told the king he should bathe once a year , preferably twice. The king said, that often?

Yeah, there does seem to be some variation, but royalty would have bathed frequently as a general rule. Depictions of people taking baths are surprisingly common in medieval art. There are enough pictures on a man in one tub and woman in another to constantly keep you mind of a Cialis commercial. Public baths were common in larger towns. You could get a bath in "common" water (used by more than one guest... higher price for first and second use) for a cheaper price, and a private bath (with fresh water, heated up, just for you!) would not be inexpensive because of the labor and time involved. Wealthy Merchants (Upper Middle Class) and above could have afforded their own tub and servants to heat the water and fill it. But even relatively poor people would have had a wash basin and a towel to give themselves a quick scrub on a near daily basis.

I'm speaking about the later Middle Ages here, mostly (13th, 14th, 15th centuries).

Four kids in the 50s and 60s. I was the oldest so I had first dibs.

In the middle ages, it would have been a wooden tub (mostly). Like a a great big half barrel.