This is what she might have looked like: identikit of the young woman whose skeleton was found in Cambridge.
Image: Cambridge Archaeological Unit
Twelve years ago, archaeologists found a 1,300-year-old skeleton buried in a wooden bed near Cambridge. Now the deceased, who came from the Alps, has been given a face.
ZTwo elderly women who did not know each other before a display case with the grave goods of a young person who was buried in the late seventh century in the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology in Cambridge got into a lively conversation about her abruptly broken life. The girl captured the imagination when it was revealed that archaeologists had uncovered her, with her startling paraphernalia, in February 2011 alongside three other early medieval graves from a small settlement on the meadows of Trumpington, on the southern outskirts of Cambridge.
The deceased was buried in a carved bed with her left hand on her chest. That alone made her stand out as a person of high rank at a time when most people didn’t own a bed. Around her bones, 13 corroded eyelets marked the outline of the lying surface, which was covered with a woolen blanket, which was possibly attached to the bed frame like a hammock.
