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While excavating outside London , archaeologists discovered yard of bones thrown down a prey shaft inRomantimes . But one , in special , stand up out : a dog ’s baculum ( penis pearl ) that had been painted crimson on one side .
" This is the only case I could find of an existent 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 electronic mail . Green detailed her findings in a survey published Dec. 25 in theOxford Journal of Archaeology .
A dog baculum discovered in Roman-era Surrey has red ochre on the bottom surface.
In 2015 , archaeologists working at a land site call Nescot in the town of Ewell , roughly 12 miles ( 19 kilometers ) to the south of London , unwrap a 13 - substructure - deep ( 4 meters ) shaft dug into the limestone . From it , they regain a big mass of human and animal bones that date to between the late first and early second one C .
Among the os were the remains of over 280 domestic mammals , including pigs , cows , horses and sheep . But according to Green , the majority of the animal — 70 % — weredogswith no evidence of slaughter , combustion or disease . Most of the dogs were pocket-sized in height — probable terriers , Welsh corgi or otherlap dogs — rather than ruck or guard dogs .
Although pits full of human and creature bone 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 - re fluorescence , which can nondestructively determine the elemental composition of an physical object , Green discover that the off-white was covered in iron oxide . Because there is no naturally occurring iron oxide at the Nescot web site and there were no metallic element artefact in the light beam to bring about rust , this means that someone specifically brushedred ochreonto a pawl ’s penis bone before depositing it in the shaft .
A view of excavations of the ritual shaft at the Nescot site in Surrey, England
tie in : Ancient detent - head statue line up during Roman road excavation
" The penis had many associations in the Roman macrocosm , and was used as agood luck charmand to guard off the vicious eye , " Green said . pass the uniqueness of the discovery and its position in a hoard of bones and artifact , it likely stand for a ritual item , she added .
Other face of the objects from the Nescot shaft paint a picture the ritual was connected to fertility . The most obvious link is the large number of very young fauna , which is strange in these sorts of shaft deposits , Green explained . to boot , dogs and horses are historically known to have been connected to " mother goddesses " and to natality rituals in Iron Age and Roman Europe . And in analyzing the seasonality of the animals ' births , Green find that most were born in the give and summer , the planting period for important crops like barleycorn and other cereals , linking them to agricultural fertility rate .
The Nescot shaft was also used repeatedly for about half a century , according to Green , with deposits made in the slam at least nine times . She find evidence that some bones were being removed from the shaft , handled and then redeposit .
— 1,500 - year - old Anglo - Saxon burial holds a ' alone ' mystery — a Roman goblet once fill with bull fat
— 4,000 - twelvemonth - old off-white unwrap ' unprecedented ' violence — tongue removal , cannibalism and disembowelment in Bronze Age Britain
— 100 - erstwhile floor patched with slice bones discovered in the Netherlands
The painted penis bone " was almost certainly defleshed when the ocher was applied , found on the logistic difficulty of removing the specific parcel of the penis from a fleshed dog , " Green said .
It is impossible to know for sure why a paint domestic dog phallus bone was put into a quarry shaft with around 300 other animate being and humans virtually two millennium ago , Green take note in her study , but the evidence supports a connexion to ideas of abundance , new lifespan and the agricultural bike .
" I could not obtain any other standardized cases of Roman use of scarlet ochre on bone , nor any example from the British Iron Age , " Green say . " It is a very unique artifact from a very unparalleled site , but it is finally a bit of a mystery . "
