Grave of the Gladiators

That's been all over the news here, and I happen to know a couple of the people involved. Interesting thing is, there's at least a couple of female skeletons there with well healed bone injuries, calluses from breaks, some healed over sword wounds and the sort of bone growth you get from heavy bruising and blunt force trauma. Female Gladiators no less, which you don;t find too many of.

The interesting thing is, quite few of the remains are missing skulls, but otherwise intact, with no new injuries. It's suggestive that they didn't die in combat, but the heads were removed post-mortem in order to be kept in a place of honour. Which, in turn, suggests two things. One that the cemetery was attached to a gladiator school [which would be the first confirmed case of one in Britain] and two, that it's almost certainly pre-Christian.

The other interesting point is that quite a few of the bones have teeth marks, some healed, some not. Large teeth marks, on arms and leg bones. Best guess is probably gladiator on animal combat. It's not for general release because it hasn't been positively confirmed, but the teeth marks look rather like big cat ones. Interestingly, those burials are slightly separate and all have their heads.

ETA
and CNN is either very biased, or working from earlier press releases.

I thought it interesting in the interview that the scientist stated that he thought that this was a graveyard for the losers, not the winners. He also said that the decapitations may have been a local variant on the "thumbs up" stab through the throat shots for the losers in Rome.

Neat link!