 Well, good afternoon everybody. Those amongst you that have read their programmes will see that my title has changed somewhat since programme was prepared. I've snuck in a subtitle there and the subtitle for those of you at the back reads, the case of the man with a stone in his mouth. So that's basically what this paper is about, it's about an individual burial that was interred in this rather unusual way. The burial comes from England, it comes from the eastern part of the Midlands from the county of Northamptonshire and it comes from the archaeological site at Stannock. Now Stannock was subject to a series of intensive excavations back in the 1980s and most of these concentrated on the settlement parts of the site but there is also a small cemetery which was excavated as well. I'll also briefly be referring to another nearby site called Great Addington which is just on the opposite bank of the River Neen there. So it's about a kilometre or so away from the main site at Stannock. So this is Stannock a little more detail. The settlement part of the site dates from the 2nd to the 5th century AD so it runs from the middle of the Roman period through to the end of the Roman Empire and through into the post-Roman early medieval period. And this is a plan, I'll stand it that way so you can see it, a plan of the cemetery area here. So we're down here by the river, this is a marsh area, probably wasn't much good for building houses on and perhaps that's why they made it their cemetery and they've got this cluster of graves here. And number 6153, which is a burial we're interested in, is sitting on the periphery of this cemetery area. Right, there are a number of odd things about this burial. First and most obviously, he lacks his lower legs. Now unfortunately that's not some weird burial ritual. What's happening there? His earth-moving machinery truncated the burial before the archaeologists could get there and so that's why he lacks his lower legs. Normative burial during this period was an extended supine inhumation. And so straight away we can see that he deviates from this normative deposition because he's buried face down in a prone position. You'll note that his left arm passes under his body and the left and right hands are quite close together to the side of the body. Now it was suggested at a time on site that this might suggest that the hands were bound together with rope or something like that that's since perished. I'm not completely convinced that's the case but it is a possibility. The other thing when we looked at his skull was that he had this flat stone wedged between his teeth. So this is the photograph taken on site in lateral view. So what we did when we saw this, we block-lifted the skull, the cranium and the mantle and the surrounding soil so we could excavate in the laboratory and so we could recover the stone or whatever other unusual evidence might be there. So here it is when we got it to the lab. So we've got this large flat stone filling most of the oral cavity and we excavated it by first removing the mandible and then excavating the stone in the associated soil. And you can see the flat stone completely fills the anterior part of the oral cavity there. We wondered whether it could simply have fallen to this position due to some sort of taffanomic process but because it's clamped so tightly in between the teeth it seems rather unlikely. It seems much more likely we're dealing with something that was there placed in that position when the corpse was buried. So we seem to be dealing with an aspect of burial ritual rather than an aspect of taffanomy here. So how do we interpret this burial? First we thought about the theoretical context for doing this and the approach we decided to take was the biocultural approach and to put it in simple terms what that means is that any interpretations that we make of this burial need to satisfy both the osteological evidence that we get from the skeleton and the cultural evidence to do with the way the man was buried. And just before we get on to the interpretation I'll say something about the date. The Roman Empire in Britain is thought to have ended around AD 410. So this individual comes from the very terminal part of Roman period or the very beginning of the post-Roman period and that actually might be quite interesting in terms of how we interpret this individual is at this sort of liminal period if you like in our history. Right, what I'm going to do now is to reverse scientific protocol. What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you our interpretation of this burial first and then I'm going to discuss the evidence and how we actually arrived at that interpretation and at the end of all that you can decide whether or not you believe our interpretation or not. So, interpretation. The stone is symbolic replacement for a tongue that was amputated in life. So on earth will we think that then. There's a small subgroup of burials from the terminal Roman and early medieval periods in Britain where it seems that missing body parts are replaced in the grave by objects. So in a literature survey of these we're able to find ten such cases from Britain and they're scattered across the middle part of England at least the ones we've identified so far and fully half of these cases come from Northamptonshire. Same county as Stannock is in. So we have two cases from Stannock and three actually from Great Addington that other site I pointed out to you. Now most of these cases are cases of decapitation where the missing head is replaced by an object but there's one rather strange barrier where you have an object replacing an amputated foot and in five cases the replacement objects are stones and in the other five cases the replacement objects are ceramic vessels or partial ceramic vessels. So let's have a look at some of these burials. These are a couple of cases where you have a severed head that's replaced by a ceramic vessel. So this one here comes from Oxfordshire and you have the head down here with a top few cervical vertebrae. The presence of the cervical vertebrae with the head is important because that shows it was severed in life. It's not just a post-depositional disturbance. So other than that it's a normative supine barrier like we'd expect in the later on period this one comes from but you've got this broken ceramic vessel where the head ought to be. This is a slightly unusual one. This actually comes from Cambridgeshire. It's a semi-prone barrier and you've got these two ceramic vessels here and this ceramic vessel here replaces a severed foot so it's left foot with severed but they replaced it there in the grove with a ceramic vessel. These are a couple of other cases from Stannock. So as well as having the bloke with a stone in his mouth you've got these two instances where you've got replacement of a severed head by a stone. So you've got severed head down here in this case and a big stone there on top of the shoulders where the head ought to be. Bone preservation at Stannock is pretty variable so this one, the bone survivor isn't quite so good. If you look carefully you can see you've got a partial cranium with a mandible placed on the abdomen there and you've got a smaller stone at the head end of the grove. So when we looked at these burrows we thought OK, well if a stone can be a replacement for a head severed in life perhaps the stone in the mouth is a replacement for a tongue that was severed in life. So we thought about what would we expect to see on the bones if the tongue was severed in life. In a perimortal event we'd expect to see knife marks perhaps around the jaw bones. We had a look and we couldn't find any evidence of that. If the tongue was severed in life and the person survived you might expect infection in the oral cavity. Our mouths are full of bacteria you've seen so infection would easily get transmitted to the bones. The classic sign of infection in the skeleton is new bone deposited upon existing bone surfaces. And this is exactly what we found in the mandible of this burrow. It's quite hard to show this sort of subtle change on a slide but this is the internal view of the mandible the tongue would have sat about here and this kind of peaty area here represents new bone deposited on the surface of the mandible. You've got some on the outside of the mandible as well a new bone deposition. So this is evidence for infection in the oral cavity. We also had a look at the other bones and we found what infection else were in the skeleton. Now that's not too unexpected because once you have infection transmitted to the bone it can easily be spread to other areas of the skeleton via the bloodstream. And so that's an expected pattern to find infection elsewhere in the skeleton. So we're seeing what we'd expect to see in this instance if we had a tongue severed in life and the individual survived for some period afterwards. So let's think about some facts about tongue amputations. Historically there's written evidence that shows sometimes these may be judicial punishments for people who have transgressed against social norms. So in the 9th century we've got laws that have been written down that say people who commit slander who make false accusations against others a penalty for that can be removal of the tongue. So we've got this punitive angle as well but we also looked at the forensic literature and in the forensic literature most examples of tongue amputation are self-inflicted. People bite their own tongues off. Usually this happens as a result of their mental illness or hallucinogenic drug abuse. So we've got this example on the left here this chap has bitten off his tongue he was severely mentally ill and that was why that happened he was in the grip of some sort of delusion or something like that. Another similar case here at the end of the time on but unfortunately that horrible brown colour that shows it being unsuccessful it hasn't restored the blood supply to the 7th part. So what are our conclusions here? Firstly a biocultural interpretation should accord with both the biological and the cultural evidence and we believe that this interpretation does do that it fits with the way the person was buried. Remember he's not just deviant because he's got a stone in his mouth he's got a road face down which is unusual that again is consistent with somebody who doesn't conform to social norms and so therefore he doesn't conform to burial norms either. So that may be consistent with a person who was being punished for some transgression against normal social behaviour or maybe didn't behave in a way that was familiar to people because he was suffering from mental illness. So I think our explanation satisfies biocultural criteria but of course we are aware that other explanations for evidence seen in this burial are also possible. We wouldn't be dogmatic about backing our own interpretation if others occur to us that might be better. Okay that's all I've got. Thank you for your attention.