After the death of Emperor Antoninus Pius in 161, the Parthians invaded Armenia, the Picts attacked Hadrian’s Wall, and the Catti entered Germania. After years of peace, the barbarians put the new emperor, Marcus Aurelius, in trouble, centuries before the invasions that definitively ended the Roman Empire.
The Sarmatians, another nomadic tribe of the Pontic plain, like the Scythians, formed an army that attacked the northeastern border. Expert horsemen, their horses were very fast and difficult to handle. Perhaps this is where the ferocity of the cavalry attacks that put Marcus Aurelius’ troops in trouble come from in the year 175 AD.
Their skills surprised the emperor, who decided to recruit these impetuous soldiers armed with spears and enormous sabers, as well as bows with iron tips and quivers made of birch bark. Sarmatian cavalry joined the Roman legions and, according to the historian Cassius Dion (163-235 AD), they sent around 5,500 of these Sarmatians to join the campaign in Britain. And that’s where this story begins.
Scientists from the Francis Crack Institute and Durham University discovered the remains of a man who lived between 126 and 228 AD near the village of Offord Cluny, in Cambridgeshire, in 2017. His remains were found, along with 41 other burials, during excavations during improvement work on the A14 national highway linking Cambridge with Huntingdon.
Until recently, however, genetic analysis of the carcasses was not performed. The results of this laboratory work, published in the journal Current Biology, have determined that this individual was not originally from the area – near where he was buried there was a rural Roman farm – but rather that his origins had to be sought thousands of kilometers away. away, in the middle of the Pontic steppe.
Researchers point out that the man – who was buried without personal possessions in a Roman road ditch – had ancestry related to people from the Caucasus and to the Sarmatians, who mainly inhabited the area around what is now southern Russia. , Romania and Ukraine.
“We started by extracting and sequencing the ancient DNA from the individual’s inner ear bone, as this is where it is best preserved. Even though the genetic code is highly fragmented and damaged, we were able to sequence a sufficient amount with good quality and compared it with samples from people who lived in different times and places in the past world,” says Marina Soares, an expert at the Ancient Genomics Laboratory of the Francis Crack Institute.
The first thing the experts saw was that this person was genetically very different from the other Romano-British individuals studied so far. “In fact, our analysis showed that he had common ancestors with previously studied individuals from the Caucasus and Sarmatian groups,” adds Soares.
As DNA testing alone could not confirm that the man was born outside Britain – it could have been his parents who moved – the team of specialists turned to other types of analysis. It was his teeth that showed both the change in food and location throughout his short life.
Archaeologists at Durham University analyzed isotopes from the teeth, to see the environment in which it grew up and how it modified its diet. “Until the age of five or six, he lived in a cold, arid place in eastern Europe. His diet at this age contained a large amount of crops such as millet and sorghum. This showed that he had common ancestors with individuals from Armenia of the Bronze Age and the Alans, a Sarmatian group from the Early Middle Ages,” says Professor Janet Montgomery.
As it grew, it migrated west and these plants disappeared from its diet. That’s when he started eating wheat, barley, rye and all the fruits and vegetables we eat today.
The team radiocarbon dated the burial of Offord Cluny between 126 and 228 AD so the deployment of the Sarmatian cavalry could be a possible explanation for their arrival in Britain. Still, this wouldn’t mean that he had been a soldier, especially considering that he was a child when he moved away.
“Isotopic analysis shows that this individual was clearly young at the time he began his journey through the Roman Empire. This relates to evidence from earlier burials from Britain which suggests that entire families may have joined the 5,500 members of the Roman Empire. Sarmatian cavalry that Marcus Aurelius sent to Great Britain,” the experts point out.
During Roman times, long-distance travel was very common. People moved from one end of the empire to the other for economic reasons, because of war or slavery and also to participate in the government of the different provinces dominated by the Romans.
“Did this young man grow up to become part of the Sarmatian cavalry? We cannot say, because we do not have any objects from his tomb that connect him to either the Roman army or the Sarmatians. Generally, we have very limited evidence of the Sarmatians stationed in Great Britain. We know that they were probably located at Hadrian’s Wall and at Catterick (North Yorkshire), but it is also possible that they were spread across the country. If this young man was part of the cavalry, then perhaps he died on the way to a military site,” the researchers add.
Whatever the reasons for this young Sarmatian’s extraordinary journey, his burial highlights how the entire Roman Empire was deeply connected to each other, from the remote desert areas of the Caucasus to a rural area of ??Cambridgeshire, separated by more than 4,100 kilometers.