The mystery warrior of Walberton
James Kenny, archaeology officer for Chichester District Council, looked into the trench and realised he’d made a mistake. The Novium Museum was about to make an announcement about the “mystery warrior” from North Bersted, a unique Late Iron Age burial excavated in 2008 and the subject of new study. It was, Kenny had written in a press release, the only such burial ever found in Sussex. Yet now he was standing beside another one. And it too was unique.
Linden Homes had planned to build 175 houses in a field east of Tye Lane on the edge of Walberton, just 4 miles (6km) from the Bersted dig across the flat coastal plain of West Sussex. The builder had commissioned Archaeology South-East ( ase, ucl Institute of Archaeology’s commercial branch) to evaluate the land, and Kenny had approved the mechanical excavation of 72, 30m x 2m trenches. In February 2019 the archaeologists found evidence for activity from the Early Neolithic into post-medieval times. It was clear construction work would disturb previously unidentified ancient deposits, and ase immediately prepared a scheme for excavation, targeting the principal concentrations of recorded remains, across areas totalling nearly 3 hectares. Fieldwork occurred between May and August, supervised by Teresa Vieira.
Discoveries included Neolithic pits, a Bronze Age cremation burial, a Roman corn dryer and post-medieval field boundaries. The bodies of two horses, apparently butchered to fit the shallow pits, had been buried side by side; nicknamed Romeo and Juliet by the archaeologists, they are thought to be relatively modern in age.
At the east end of the field was the ditch of an enclosure, squarish in plan, most of which lies under existing houses. Its precise date will not become clear until post-excavation has been conducted, Vieira tells British Archaeology, but it may have overlapped in use with the digging of a pit inside its circuit. The pit’s long, sub-rectangular shape was “really really hard to distinguish”, says Vieira. A pot could be seen at one end, its top machined off.
As sample excavation proceeded, dark material could be seen on the bottom and metalwork was identified. “I had a gut feeling from the beginning that we had a grave,” says Vieira. It was time to fully excavate the feature.
Comparisons with the North Bersted burial are unavoidable. The latter is dated by the style of objects in the grave, supported by radiocarbon analysis, to around 50bc – leading to the suggestion that the man with exotic continental goods may have been a tribal leader who had fled Caesar’s advance across France (feature Mar/Apr 2020/171). The pots in the Walberton burial – four were standing at the probable head end, as did four in the Bersted grave – suggest the former ceremony occurred a little later, in the first half of the new millennium; the jars are of local GalloBelgic type. If the Bersted warrior had encountered Caesar, it’s possible the Walberton man witnessed Claudius’s invasion of Britain in ad43.
Though no bones survived, similar contemporary graves in southern England contain the remains of men, suggesting the individual was indeed male. His sword and spear – assuming he had been placed on his back – had been laid down the left side of his body. Some copper-alloy sheet could be part of a mirror, a mark of feminine identity, leaving open the possibility that the Walberton warrior was a woman – or even intersex. More likely, perhaps, the metal will prove to be from a vessel (but not a shield); investigation is in progress.
A layer of burnt wood covered much of the pit bottom, its rectangular plan suggesting a burial container. There was no sign of burning having occurred in the pit, saysVieira, says Vieira, so thewood the wood had been brought charred to the graveside; she wonders if it had been a hollowedout tree trunk. Such containers rarely survive intact, but can look either like logboats or more simply a section of tree. As yet unidentified iron objects seem to mark its outline. It is hoped study will reveal whether these were parts of the container, or perhaps spears, set standing at each corner or thrown into the grave. The entire grave fill was sampled for study, but no bone has been found. This is probably a matter of survival (the horse bones having been in the ground for less time), but the possibility remains that there never was a body. Chemical traces will be sought in the wood.
The most impressive object is the sword, currently being conserved at the lab in the Collections Discovery Centre at Fishbourne Roman Palace. Unusually for this type of burial, the weapon had not been damaged (the blade in the Bersted gave had been bent nearly double). It lay half inside an organic scabbard, with a decorative copperalloy mount buried face down and out of sight. Dotted rows visible in x- ray images and looking a little like zips were at first thought to be possible indications of clothing preserved in the iron corrosion, but that remains an open question while study continues.
As at Bersted, at Walberton the burial of a distinguished individual seems to have occurred in an active but otherwise undistinguished location. In Roman times, however, there was a villa the other side of Tye Lane, probably connected to the new-found corn dryer. Seasonal excavation by the Worthing Archaeological Society began at BlacksmithsCorner Blacksmiths Corner in 2006 after the landowner reported finding Roman pottery. Themasonrywall The masonry wall foundations of a previously unknown “corridor villa” were found. It began in the third century ad as a five-roomed building, maintained and altered into the fourth century, including with the addition of a bathhouse. Its plan is similar to other villas in the region of the same age. However, kitchen waste in a ditch includes first century artefacts, suggesting earlier activity on the site, conceivably near in date to that of the burial to the north-west.