For more than a decade, the “Beachy Head Woman” was treated like a cultural Rorschach test. Found in a box in southern England and dated to Roman-occupied Britain, her skull convinced researchers that she must have come from some distant land. Most likely sub-Saharan Africa.
As such, she was called the “first Black Briton.” Later, she was repositioned as a migrant from the eastern Mediterranean. Fast forward to today, and we’ve developed better science since her discovery and have found that the Beachy-Headed Woman isn’t who we thought she was.
As CNN reports, the researchers behind a new study published in the Journal of Archaeological Science used high-quality DNA sequencing to show that the Beachy Head Woman was local to southern England.
DNA Finally Solved the Mystery of the ‘Beachy Head Woman’
According to the researchers at London’s Natural History Museum, her genetic profile closely matches that of other people living in rural Roman-era Britain and even modern Britons. There’s no evidence of recent African ancestry.
Based on her DNA, she likely had light hair, blue eyes, and a skin tone somewhere between pale and dark, which, to me, seems like such a broad range as to be entirely imprecise.
The finding goes to show how scientific theories based on prior knowledge—educated guesses, basically—can supplant fact, if for no other reason than that there just weren’t the tools around at the time to make a definitive case.
Earlier conclusions that relied on craniometric analysis, which is a pseudoscience that tries to infer ancestry from skull shape, are deeply, deeply rooted in racism and general medical and scientific quackery.
As such, and as this case shows, it’s also not at all accurate, which is not an uncommon thing to discover when you dissect the supposedly analytical tools used in the propping up of racial hierarchies.
The woman herself lived sometime between 129 and 311 CE. She was probably between 18 and 25, and stood just under five feet tall. She ate a seafood-heavy diet and survived at least one serious leg injury.
She is living, or rather, once-living proof that it’s easy to misread the past, especially when we project our modern ideas and biases onto something ancient.
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