Skull from the 3rd Century

In 1993, employees of the Frankfurt Monuments Office discovered the skeletons of a man, a woman and a child in Roman NIDA. They had been brutally murdered and then thrown into a well filled with construction debris and cake scraps. Beatings on the face and skull as well as on the body tell of a cruel act of violence. Ceramic fragments date the crime to the middle of the 3rd century, when internal Roman conflicts and Germanic raids threatened the civilian population. According to the anthropological analysis, the dead belonged to a Germanic ethnic group. An mtDNA analysis carried out at the University of Mainz showed that the woman and the child must be related in the maternal line, but that the man cannot be the father.