A FACE has been created for a teenage girl who was buried with a rare gold-and-garnet cross sewn on to the bosom of her dress in the earliest days of Christianity in England.
The fine quality of the jewel, dubbed the Trumpington Cross, after the location near Cambridge where it was unearthed, in 2012, led experts to believe that the girl, aged about 16, could well have been seventh-century Anglo-Saxon royalty (News, 30 March 2012).
Now, the forensic artist Hew Morrison has created a likeness, using measurements of her skull and tissue-depth data. A lack of DNA meant that he could not determine her precise eye and hair colour, but the image offers a strong indication of her appearance. He said: “It was interesting to see her face developing. Her left eye was slightly lower, about half a centimetre, than her right eye. This would have been quite noticeable in life.”
Details of her diet and lifestyle have also been pieced together by analysis of the teenager’s bones and teeth by two bioarchaeologists, Dr Sam Leggett and Dr Alice Rose, and the archaeologist Dr Emma Brownlee. They suggest that she moved to England from somewhere near the Alps, perhaps southern Germany, when she was aged about seven. Dr Leggett said: “She travelled a long way to somewhere completely unfamiliar — even the food was different. It must have been scary.
“It seems that she was part of an elite group of women from mainland Europe, but they remain a bit of a mystery. Were they political brides, or perhaps brides of Christ? The fact that her diet changed once she arrived in England suggests that her lifestyle may have changed quite significantly.”
Her burial on a carved wooden bed is one of only 18 such burials found in Britain, and the cross is one of only five known to archaeologists. Dr Sam Lucy, a specialist in Anglo-Saxon burial, said: “Given the increasingly certain association between bed burial, cross-shaped jewellery, and early Anglo-Saxon Christianity, it is possible that their movement related to pan-European networks of elite women who were heavily involved in the Early Church.”
The girl’s likeness, the cross, and other artefacts from the grave are on show in an exhibition, “Beneath Our Feet”, at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, Cambridge, until next April.
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