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Photos Surgical Tools
The board game and its arranged pieces, however, are anything but common. None other like it has ever been found at Roman-era sites in Great Britain. Surviving metal corners and hinges from the board allowed Pitts to reconstruct it as an 8-inch by 12-inch rectangle. Raised sides suggest dice might have been used. The white and blue glass counters were positioned with care. Some were straight across the sides, another in a diagonal line and one white marker close to the board's center. Pitts believes the game may have been another "divination tool," along with the rods, jet bead and scent bottles also excavated at Stanway. Philip Crummy, director of the Colchester Archaeological Trust, told Discovery News that the person in the burial could very well have been a Druid "given the healing and divination attributes -- assuming that Druids could be trained in these skills." Crummy agrees with Pitts that such individuals would have been "near the top of the social scale in Iron Age Britain." He is, however, not yet convinced the person was Celtic, since the medical kit was "fairly Romanized" and the individual may have acted "like a Roman surgeon/doctor would have done." "Divination was widely practiced in the Roman world too," he added. Because of site's age and location, Pitts is more inclined to believe the person was indeed a Celtic Druid and could have been closely related to Cunobelin, a chief or king of the Catuvellauni tribe. William Shakespeare immortalized Cunobelin as "Cymbeline" in a play of that same name. Cunobelin's sons led a heroic, yet failed, resistance against Roman Emperor Claudius' invasion of England in 43 A.D. Related Links: |
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