Burials at Caistor St Edmund/Venta Icenorum

Project summary

Caistor St Edmund (originally Venta Icenorum) in Norfolk was a thriving Roman town with a forum, theatre, and defensive wall and ditches around the outside.

Following excavations by Will Bowden and the Caistor Roman Project Group eight skeletons have been recovered in various places within and outside the town. 

Project details

As yet, the main cemeteries have not been discovered, so we must learn as much as we can about the inhabitants of Venta Icenorum from these remains.

With help from MA (by Research) students Joe Jordan and Fiona Moore we have completed skeletal reports for each individual, and put them within the context of local and national Romano-British burial practices.

Now, with funding from BICCAG, we’re examining their diet and whether or not the people are likely to be local to the area, using strontium, oxygen, carbon and nitrogen isotopes, in collaboration with colleagues in the Centre for Environmental Geochemistry. When the results are ready, it will be very interesting to see if people close to the coast in urban Roman Norfolk moved more or less than the people from the coastal but rural site of Doghole in Cumbria.