When you purchase through links on our web site , we may earn an affiliate committee . Here ’s how it work .
While dig outside London , archeologist discovered thou of bones thrown down a target shaft inRomantimes . But one , in special , stood out : a hot dog ’s baculum ( penis bone ) that had been paint red on one side .
" This is the only example I could find of an factual penis having potentially been used as a ritual object,“Ellen Green , a bioarchaeologist at the University of Reading in the U.K. , tell Live Science in an electronic mail . Green detailed her findings in a sketch 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 site called Nescot in the townspeople of Ewell , roughly 12 miles ( 19 kilometers ) in the south of London , discovered a 13 - foot - deep ( 4 meters ) shaft moil into the limestone . From it , they recovered a prominent multitude of human and beast off-white that date to between the tardy first and former 2d centuries .
Among the finger cymbals were the remains of over 280 domestic mammal , including fuzz , oxen , horses and sheep . But according to Green , the majority of the animate being — 70 % — weredogswith no evidence of butchering , electrocution or disease . Most of the dogs were small in height — likely terrier , Welsh corgi or otherlap click — rather than herd or ward dogs .
Although pits full of human and beast bone and artifacts have been bump throughout papistic - era Britain , the paint penis pearl from the Nescot dick is the first of its sort . Using a proficiency called X - ray fluorescence , which can nondestructively determine the elemental composition of an physical object , Green discovered that the ivory was covered in Fe oxide . Because there is no course occur iron oxide at the Nescot site and there were no metallic element artefact in the barb to produce rust , this means that someone specifically brushedred ochreonto a frank ’s penis bone before fix it in the gibe .
A view of excavations of the ritual shaft at the Nescot site in Surrey, England
refer : Ancient blackguard - headed statue find during romish route excavation
" The phallus had many association in the R.C. world , and was used as agood luck charmand to ward aside the evil eye , " Green said . give the uniqueness of the breakthrough and its placement in a cache of clappers and artefact , it belike represents a ritual item , she added .
Other facet of the objects from the Nescot shaft propose the rite was colligate to fertility . The most obvious connection is the big telephone number of very young animals , which is unusual in these sorts of shaft deposits , Green explain . to boot , dogs and horses are historically do it to have been colligate to " mother goddess " and to fertility rate rite in Iron Age and Roman Europe . And in analyzing the seasonality of the beast ' birth , Green found that most were born in the spring and summertime , the planting stop for of import crops like barleycorn and other cereals , linking them to agricultural fecundity .
The Nescot shaft was also used repeatedly for about half a century , grant to Green , with deposit made in the shaft at least nine times . She found grounds that some osseous tissue were being removed from the shaft , manage and then redeposited .
— 1,500 - year - old Anglo - Saxon burial holds a ' unequalled ' mystery — a Roman chalice once fill up with pig fat
— 4,000 - year - old bones reveal ' unprecedented ' wildness — clapper removal , cannibalism and disembowelment in Bronze Age Britain
— one C - old floor patched with sliced pearl fall upon in the Netherlands
The painted penis bone " was almost certainly defleshed when the ochre was applied , based on the logistic trouble of removing the specific lot of the penis from a fleshed dog , " Green order .
It is impossible to know for sure why a paint dog penis bone was put into a target barb with around 300 other animals and humans nearly two millennium ago , Green noted in her study , but the evidence supports a linkup to idea of abundance , new life and the agricultural cps .
" I could not encounter any other similar case of papistical employment of ruby-red ocher on bone , nor any lesson from the British Iron Age , " Green sound out . " It is a very unique artefact from a very unique internet site , but it is in the end a bit of a mystery . "
