The Mysterious Woman of the Wetwang Chariot Burial. From the Desk of J.D. Lacroix
Photos, below: Main illustration: reconstruction by Dr Caroline Wilkinson, Unit of Art in Medicine, University of Manchester. © 2002 Unit of Art in Medicine, University of Manchester
The
Woman: What did she look like?
The skeleton has provided many clues about the woman buried at Wetwang. She appears to have been between 35 and 45 years old, unusually old for the Iron Age; only one in four women lived to be more than 35 years. Also, at 1.75 metres (5 foot 9 inches), she is the tallest woman found so far in an Iron Age grave in East Yorkshire. Dr. Caroline Wilkinson of the University of Manchester is an expert in facial reconstruction from skull evidence. When Caroline came to model the face, she made a very interesting discovery. One side of the woman's face seems to have grown faster than the other. More work by specialists is needed to decide exactly what was wrong with her, but it is suggested that she may have suffered from ahaemangioma which gave her marks on the right side of the face from birth. Some years before her death the woman was involved in an accident, dislocating her right shoulder. This never properly healed and as a result she would not have been able to raise her arm, and would, for example, have been unable to drive a chariot
What was her mirror
for? Resting against the woman's ankles in the grave was an
iron mirror. Because the mirror is so fragile - most of the iron having
turned to rust - it was lifted in a block of earth packed in plaster of
Paris and expanding foam and brought back to the Museum's conservation
laboratory. Subsequent careful cleaning of the mirror by Claire Heywood is
revealing unexpected things. At the end of the handle Claire found well over
a hundred tiny blue glass beads, so small that they could only have been
threaded on to horse hairs. The beads were probably not made in Britain. She
has also found metal and coral beads.
Were the beads from a tassel at the end of the handle, or perhaps from a bag
in which the mirror was kept? As the mirror decayed, impressions formed in
the rust of some cloth where it touched the mirror. Future work on this will
tell us more. However, there are some questions that we may never be able to
fully answer: Why was the mirror in the grave? Was it an important personal
object that the woman used in life? Did the mirror have a special religious
or magical role?
The article continues on the following pages.