Secrets of the Dead: Headless Romans

The PBS documentary special Secrets of the Dead: Headless Romans explores one of the strangest, most macabre, and purely baffling enigmas to face historians in recent years. Beneath Hadrian's Wall, near the English city of York, archaeologists unearth a series of ancient skeletons partially decapitated and posed by their buriers in gruesome positions. One, for instance, has its skull dismembered and placed beneath its feet; another bears enormous iron shackles clamped around its ankles; 28 additional skeletons all present displays of violent, sadistic death and torture. This discovery naturally raises a myriad of questions about the origin of the bodies, the historical atrocities that may lie behind the cadavers, and the identity of the buried individuals per se. In Secrets of the Dead: Headless Bodies, a team of archaeologists and historians gather to speculate on the answers to these queries, and uncover long-buried truths about one of the most shadowy and least-known eras in Roman history.