It was an ordinary Roman cemetery, containing the bodies of ordinary people who lived and died on the banks of the Thames. However, skeletal analysis has forced historians to rethink the history been Europe and Asia.
Analysis show two of the skeletons, dating to between the 2nd and 4th century AD are intact, Chinese. It raises new questions as this discovery put inter-continental travel from the east some 1000 years before the travels of Marco Polo who is long accepted as the person bringing the culture of the east to people of the west.
The excavation of the cemetery in modern day Southwark has identified a multicultural community of four people, two ethnically Africa and two Asian, most probably Chinese. According to Rebecca Redfern from the Museum of London, the find is spectacular but also mysterious. “In this cemetery, they’re Mr Average Roman Londoner. There’s nothing marking them out, so this was a total surprise. We have no inscription evidence or anything to suggest people of this ancestry were present in Roman Britain.”
Isotope analysis shows the east Asians were not born in Britain, but there is little further information about their origin. It is speculated that they themselves came from China, or maybe a relative, or perhaps generations of eastward migrating relatives. Before this, the only east Asian skeleton within the Roman empire to found was in Italy.
