This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: In 1955, workers in a chalk quarry in Highsted, near Sittingbourne, were working when a human skull came tumbling down the bank at the edge of a pit. It would be the first of some 26 burials, all belonging to an ancient cemetery.
Rescue excavations began to salvage the remains before the quarry destroyed them. Excavators took photos and made notes, and the local newspaper reported the findings to its curious readers. Then, as the excavation ended, the finds began to disappear: pots went into private collections, notes vanished, and bones were shuffled around and eventually forgotten.
Highsted cemetery was written off as "lost." That changed when Michael Legge, then a doctoral student, decided to take another look at the old assemblage. He and his colleagues discovered the cemetery was used from the late Iron Age to the early Roman period and may be the third-largest Deal-rite cemetery known. Their findings are published in the Oxford Journal of Archaeology.
According to Legge, "The process was quite a bit like a detective story really—tracking down artifacts, speaking to local people and museum curators, working through newspaper clippings, and piecing the story of the excavation back together." Highsted is a disused chalk quarry near Rodmersham Green in southern England, the study reports. The area has a long archaeological history, with various finds dating back to the Roman period discovered there over the past two centuries. In 1955 quarry workers began unearthing skeletons, prompting a rescue excavation that uncovered 20 skeletons, pots, a brooch and six potential human cremations.
According to the study, most of what survives from these excavations consists of old photographs, newspaper reports and interviews with excavators and curators of the remains. What happened to the finds after excavation is contested; one excavator claimed the finds were sent to Maidstone and Milton Regis Court Hall Museums, with a full report written up but left unpublished by the Kent Archaeological Society. Others claim everything was stolen or returned to the quarry owners.
Over the years, four remaining pots and the remains of 16 people have been accounted for. The bones were hopelessly jumbled after being stored in paper bags in a damp basement; the bags eventually deteriorated and spilled their contents. In 2018, during his doctoral studies, Legge began identifying the remaining bones at Maidstone Museum.
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