A puff of dust almost 2,000 years old rose as archaeologist Jackie Keily gently tipped a wastepaper bin-sized lead container, and a pile of cremated Roman remains slid out towards bones expert Rebecca Redfern.

“Oh wonderful, look!” Redfern said, pouncing on a bone with the excitement of a treasure hunter. “A toe! Look how white that bone is – really excellent cremation technique.”

The two experts at the Museum of London have been searching delicately through thousands of scraps of bone, opening cremation urns excavated in the 19th century but never before studied, revealing new information about death in the Roman capital ahead of an exhibition opening in May.

The remains of more than 25,000 humans are in the museum collection, the UK’s largest, but while carefully catalogued and stored, many have never been examined in detail.

Jackie Keily (left) and Rebecca Redfern inspect a selection of bones. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

Among the cremated Romans almost no trace of clothing, shrouds, coffins or grave goods survived the flames, so every scrap of evidence is precious. So far, Keily and Redfern have found one fingernail-sized scrap of copper alloy that may be part of a brooch – suggesting the person was cremated wearing their clothes – and one pig tooth, which could be evidence of funeral feasting or food burned with the dead.

The whitened bone reveals that although the cylinder of sheet lead was an unglamorous casket – compared with beautiful glass jars, some with glass lids, others closed with a wine cup, which they have also opened – this was a very expensive funeral. It must have been conducted by professional cremators, who burned the body in the open in the eastern cemetery beyond the Roman city walls, on a pyre of expensive wood probably two metres tall, with the fire reaching a temperature of more than 600C (1,112F).



Although the lead container, like the glass jars, is believed to have been made specially to hold cremations, some were buried in old pots. “That raises its own questions,” Kiely said. “Did you use an old piece of household ware that was no use any longer, or was granny buried in the Roman equivalent of her favourite Le Creuset orange casserole?”

Cremated remains belonged to the elite, as burial was the cheapest way of disposing of the dead. Photograph: Alicia Canter/The Guardian

The most expensive funerals buried the body in a stone sarcophagus. The inspiration for the exhibition was the discovery of one last year in Southwark, south London. It was only the third found intact in the capital in recent decades, after that of a tall man uncovered at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields church in 2006, and the famous “Spitalfields lady” whose sarcophagus was opened live on television in 1999. The Southwark sarcophagus is believed to have been robbed of valuables in antiquity, but its surviving contents including human remains are still being studied.

Burial of a complete body was the cheapest way of disposing of the dead, so the cremated remains in their pots and jars, however humble their appearance, were already an elite.

The bones in the lead canister survived in large chunks, including vertebrae, parts of the pelvis, ribs, and large pieces of skull. Redfern was impressed at how carefully even the tiny bones of the feet and hands had been collected from the ashes of the pyre. Often the 19th-century excavation records are missing or are very scrappy. Redfern can already tell, from another treasure she pounced on – a sphenoid-occipital synchondrosis – that the dead person was almost certainly an adult since those skull bones only become completely fused in teenagers.



Most of the bones from the glass jars are in tiny fragments, some like gritty sand, and must have been deliberately broken up. They also do not add up to a complete cremated body: Redfern estimated only about 20% of the remains went into the container, though fragments from all the main parts of the body were selected.

“So what’s going on here?” Keily wondered. “Clearly it’s not important to preserve the entire body, so is the cremation urn just a symbol, a focus of remembrance? These bones have more to tell us.”