This 1,000-year-old girl's skeleton reveals gloomy detail about life in the Middle Ages

When we think of the Middle Ages, we usually think of grey, gloomy images. While this somewhat pessimistic view of the medieval centuries has been challenged by many scholars, life in medieval Europe was not always pleasant, as this somewhat gloomy discovery attests.

The skeleton of a teenage girl

In Cambridgeshire, near Conington, a small village with a population of 150 people, a team of archaeologists found a burial site concealing the skeleton of a young girl. According to bone analysis, the girl was only 15 years old.

But even more intriguing than the girl's age at the time of her death are the details revealed by her tomb. The skeleton was found face down, ankles bound.

Read more:Scientists reconstruct the face of a teenage girl who died 1300 years ago (PHOTO)

An ostracized girl?

Don Walker, osteologist at the Museum of London Archaeology (MOLA), testified in a statement that:

We'll probably never know exactly how this young woman was perceived by the community she grew up in, but the way she was buried tells us that she was most certainly considered different.

Found outside the village itself, there's every reason to believe that the teenager was ostracized, according to Don Walker. Indeed, these 'funeral rites may reflect the nature of her death, her social identity or that of her family', he continues.

It's even possible that the community bound the girl's ankles, believing that her corpse could rise from the grave and harm the living.

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The Kingdom of Mercia

According to archaeologists, the girl's body was buried over 1,000 years ago, between 680 and 880 AD. Bone analysis shows traces of malnutrition and joint disease. A condition probably linked to hard manual labour.

The village, populated by a colony of the kingdom of Mercy that ruled here between the eighth and ninth centuries, was one of the kingdom's major administrative centers thanks to its central position. However, the colony was abandoned at the beginning of the second millennium, when Mercia suffered the full force of the Viking invasions. The abandonment of the village coincides with the date of the girl's burial.

Read more:Archaeologists make terrifying discovery of a 17th-century 'vampire child' in Poland

This article has been translated from Gentside FR.

Sources used:

LiveScience: Medieval girl buried face down with bound ankles, likely so she couldn't 'return' from the grave