Archaeologists in Britain discovered thousands of animal bones in a Roman quarry shaft, including a unique painted dog's penis bone. This finding suggests the bone may have been used in a ritual.
While excavating outside London, archaeologists discovered thousands of bones thrown down a quarry shaft in Roman times. But one, in particular, stood out: a dog's baculum (penis bone) that had been painted red on one side. 'This is the only example I could find of an actual penis having potentially been used as a ritual object,' Ellen Green, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading in the U.K., told Live Science in an email. Green detailed her findings in a study published Dec.
25 in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology. In 2015, archaeologists working at a site called Nescot in the town of Ewell, roughly 12 miles (19 kilometers) south of London, discovered a 13-foot-deep (4 meters) shaft dug into the limestone. From it, they recovered a large mass of human and animal bones that date to between the late first and early second centuries. Among the bones were the remains of over 280 domestic mammals, including pigs, cows, horses and sheep. But according to Green, the majority of the animals — 70% — were dogs with no evidence of butchering, burning or disease. Most of the dogs were small in stature — likely terriers, corgis or other lap dogs — rather than herd or guard dogs. Although pits full of human and animal bones and artifacts have been found throughout Roman-era Britain, the painted penis bone from the Nescot shaft is the first of its kind. Using a technique called X-ray fluorescence, which can nondestructively determine the elemental composition of an object, Green discovered that the bone was covered in iron oxide. Because there is no naturally occurring iron oxide at the Nescot site and there were no metal artifacts in the shaft to produce rust, this means that someone specifically brushed red ochre onto a dog's penis bone before depositing it in the shaf
ROMAN BRITAIN ANIMAL SACRIFICE RITUAL OBJECT DOG BONES ARTIFACTS
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