4000 Year Old Miracle Unearthed! Clay Urn With Human Remains Discovered in Cornwall

A new discovery has been unearthed from a field in Southeast Cornwall. Scientists found a clay urn with human remains intact belonging to roughly between 12th or 13th century. The set of burnt human remains were found near Looe and could be a related to mysterious Bronze Age ritual ceremony. The discovery is no less than a miracle as the farmers here had been ploughing the fields for a lifetime. So to find the ancient artefact below the earth's surface was shocking for them as well.

Catherine Frieman from Australian National University (ANU) recently excavated an untouched ancient barrow near the town of Looe in South East Cornwall. She dug it for 14-days and found the artefacts. “We were so excited to find such a lot of archaeology on the site despite scores of generations of ploughing, but to find an intact clay urn buried 4,000 years ago just 25 centimetres beneath the surface is nothing short of a miracle,” said Frieman. The other evidence from the sites points that there was a burial site here in the prehistoric era until the middle ages. “This is a sealed, intact cremation so it has the potential to tell us a lot about the cremation rite as it was practised 4,000 years ago. We also appear to have some identifiable fragments of bone among the cremated remains so we’ll potentially be able to tell a lot about the individual themselves,” she said.

They now plan to study the age and gender of the humans from the bone preservation. They will also do analyses to find more about the diet, the food they had and where it was coming from, also the drinks they had and more of their lifestyle. The other items on this excavation site were Cornish Bronze Age pottery, flint tools and two high-quality hammer stones, used to make flint tools. But these findings are puzzling to the researchers as it also has medieval artefacts. They found a layer of flat stones and some cooked food remains stuck to it. “Hundreds of years after the barrow was built, someone from the 12th or 13th century came back to this site and dug into it to bury this pot,” she said.

The burial, however, has been quite an exciting find. During the 12th or 13th century there were two local monasteries in view of the site. The team also excavated a roundhouse – an ancient dwelling or land marker nearby. They are now trying to learn the time and reasons behind these. Right now an analysis of soil, pollen, flint and other samples is being done but they said it could at least take a year to discover the comprehensive story of this find. (With agency inputs)

(The above story first appeared on LatestLY on May 20, 2018 06:54 PM IST. For more news and updates on politics, world, sports, entertainment and lifestyle, log on to our website latestly.com).