A human skeleton found in a box in the basement of Eastbourne town hall in 2012, has, not for the first time, caused some controversy.
Known as the ‘Beachy Head Lady’, her remains were discovered during a study of 250 skeletons in the council’s collection. She was found to be a Roman woman with recent sub-Saharan African ancestry, leading to her being called the ‘first black Briton’ and ‘one of the earliest Africans in Britain’. Now a new study has found that she was, in fact, a light-haired native Briton.
The African claim was always controversial. Archaeologists hailed it as evidence that Britain has always been multicultural. Others, who felt the scientists had an agenda, now feel vindicated by the discovery that she actually had blue eyes and light hair.
Are they right to feel this way? And are archaeologists and scientists too ready to project modern values into the past?
First the science. As part of the original study, a forensic examination of the Beachy Head Lady’s skull found traits ‘consistent’, to use the researchers’ word, with an individual of sub-Saharan African ancestry – a rare case of someone with this background being found this early, and this far north, in Europe.
Public interest was immediate, and strong. Eastbourne exhibited a clay model of the young woman’s head, with dark skin, eyes and wavy hair. In his 2016 book Black and British, David Olusoga proclaimed her ‘the first black Briton known to us’, and a plaque celebrating this was hung in East Dean village cricket pavilion, above Beachy Head.
The plaque came down in 2022, after further research suggested the woman was more likely to have had east Mediterranean ancestry. That was the preliminary conclusion of DNA analysis. The latest study has now used more advanced technology to analyse her DNA.
The evidence, described in the Journal of Archaeological Science, convincingly shows the woman had blue eyes, light hair and intermediate skin colour – neither particularly dark nor pale. There’s no reason to think she wasn’t born in what is now East Sussex to native parents, and her diet was fittingly rich in fish.
The team responsible, mostly in London at the Natural History Museum and the UCL Genetics Institute, say there’s nothing unusual about the way the story has changed; science progresses and old studies are healthily revisited. Researchers have been losing faith in physiognomy as an indicator of ethnic identity. The study of ancient DNA continually improves.
Does the loss of a once-supposed African woman change what we know about Roman Britain? No. During this period, soldiers, traders, captives and more travelled the length and breadth of the Roman empire. There is plenty of substantive evidence that a wide range of cultures and ethnicities could be seen across northern Europe at the time, not least in inscribed altars, tombstones and military diplomas pointing to Africa. On our own Hadrian’s Wall, an exceptionally fine tombstone was dedicated to a freed slave called Victor the Moor, who came from the same part of north-west Africa as a military unit stationed on the wall, called the Numerus Maurorum Aurelianorum (the unit of Aurelian Moors).
In York, we have a Roman woman – who has been confidently identified as of north African descent – wearing an elephant ivory bangle. Part of an ivory box featuring the Egyptian god Anubis from Leicester – the most northern known such representation – was found near the remains of a monumental fountain house. It had been decorated with planets representing days of the Roman week, an Egyptian fashion (to which we owe our names, Saturday, Sunday and Monday) popularised by Septimius Severus, the first African-born Roman emperor. There is a wealth of data which shows, without doubt, that Roman Britain had deep links with the rest of the Empire.
As for the Beachy Head Lady, we still know little about the woman found in the Eastbourne basement. The box was labelled ‘Beachy Head’, but no recorded excavation there uncovered any burials. We can confidently say she was Roman from radiocarbon dating of her bones, which show she lived some time between 130 and 310 AD.She may, like most of her compatriots, have had whitish skin, but the native population was not always thus.
People have been in Britain without break since the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. The first – personified by Cheddar Man – had dark brown or possibly black hair, and dark or black skin. Despite claims to the contrary, there is no reason to question the science behind this. Over the millennia, skin colour lightened. This occurred chiefly because of widely separated, large-scale migrations from the continent, signified not just by changing DNA, but also the arrival of new cultural norms and technologies. As it happens, at the time Stonehenge was built, skin colour was typically brown.
To speak of ancient black Britons, as the historically informed David Olusoga does, is one thing. Celebrating native ‘Black Britons’, with a capital B, is another. The first acknowledges skin colour, the second allies it – quite wrongly – with Africa, via North American history and politics. That is what Atinuke and Kingsley Nebechi do in their children’s book, Brilliant Black British History. They take the wrong message from the scientific and archaeological evidence that shows people in Britain were black for much of the past. Why should that surprise us, when ultimately as a species we all come from the African continent? The most important conclusion is that colour does not define a nation.
