Unearthed Roman sculpture provides further mysteries
When you dig in a country with as much history as Britain, sometimes you find something remarkable.
It might be a gold necklace. It might be the bones of a king.
Or, in a more recent case, it might be the marble head of a woman from the Roman era that disappeared at some point in the past 250 years.
Sometimes such a find comes with a mystery: How the heck did the woman make her way from Burghley House, a stately home near Peterborough, England, to a shallow grave 300 yards away?
“Burghley has thrown up all sorts of discoveries over the years,” said Jon Culverhouse, the house’s curator. “In cupboards, under stairs.”
A crew was building an auxiliary parking lot for the house last spring when the operator of an excavator, Greg Crawley, spotted the head in dirt he had lifted. It was buried only a foot or so beneath the surface.
Weeks later, the lady’s shoulders were found, although they were sculpted much later than the marble head. This kind of Frankenstein statue was common in the 18th century, as adding modern shoulders made the ancient head more desirable to a potential buyer.
The head has been dated to the first or second century, and it was very likely acquired by Brownlow Cecil, the ninth Earl of Exeter, on a trip to Italy in the 1760s. Such trips, known as the Grand Tour, were “a rite of passage for a young aristocrat,” Culverhouse said.
So, how did the statue wind up buried? It’s hard to know, in part because the head does not appear on any inventory that researchers have been able to find.
But Culverhouse can offer some “informed speculation,” he said. He thinks it was stolen, probably within 100 years of its acquisition.