Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeology undergraduates from the University of Cambridge were on a training dig when they discovered a group burial just three miles outside of town.
• Dated to the ninth century C.E., a time when the Vikings ruled the area, the grave held the remains of at least 10 different young men.
• One set of remains belonged to an individual who would have been considered a giant in his day.

A team of University of Cambridge students made a giant discovery during a training dig just three miles outside of the city, both figuratively and literally. The 2025 dig seemed unpromising at first, but that changed with the discovery of a ninth-century C.E. group burial.

Based on the number of skulls found among the remains, the archaeology team concluded that burial pit in Wandlebury contained the bodies of at least 10 individuals. The most remarkable individual discovered in the pit was a man whose height, at 6 feet 5 inches, was so far above average for his time that he would have been considered a giant. Adding to the intrigue, the giant had a hole surgically bored into his skull.

“Before we uncovered the first remains, our best find was a 1960s Smarties lid,” said archaeology undergraduate student Olivia Courtney in a statement. “I had never encountered human remains on a dig, and I was struck by how close yet distant these people felt. We were separated by only a few years in age, but over a thousand years in time.”

The spot on the outskirts of Cambridge was once a frontier war zone during the conflict between the Saxon-run kingdom of Mercia, which controlled the area in the late eighth century under King Offa, and the neighboring kingdom of East Anglia. Around 874, the Viking Great Army sacked the town, and Cambridgeshire was subsequently incorporated into a Viking-ruled kingdom of East Anglia.

The burial pit was probably a result of that conflict, given that all the remains in it were those of young men. The mass grave was a mix of complete and dismembered remains, ranging from skulls without clear accompanying bodies, a stack of legs, and four complete skeletons. Some of the remains were even found in positions suggesting that they had been tied together. Experts believe the young men were tossed into the pit without ceremony, likely after a battle or a mass execution.

The “giant” was between the age of 17 and 24, face down in the pit. With the average male standing only 5-foot, 6-inches tall in that day, the man would have been considered wildly abnormal. A one-inch-diameter hole in his skull points to a trepanation procedure, which was believed at the time to relieve migraines and seizures.

“The individual may have had a tumor that affected their pituitary gland and caused an excess of growth hormones,” Trish Biers, curator of the Duckworth Collections at the university, said in a statement. “We can see this in the unique characteristics in the long shafts of their limb bones and elsewhere on the skeleton. Such a condition in the brain would have led to increased pressure in the skull, causing headaches that the trepanning may have been an attempt to alleviate. Not uncommon with head trauma today.”

Some of the men had traces of combat injuries, including one who had chop marks on his jaw, indicating that he was beheaded. The way that parts were tossed haphazardly into the pit, including ribs, a pelvis, and legs stacked together on top of corpses, suggested that the burial followed some sort of mass execution.

“Those buried could have been recipients of corporal punishment, and that may be connected to Wandlebury as a sacred or well-known meeting place,” said the university’s Oscar Aldred. “It may be that some of the disarticulated body parts had previously been displayed as trophies and were then gathered up and interred with the executed or otherwise slaughtered individuals.”

However, apart from signs of beheading, there isn’t much evidence that the body parts were chopped up. Aldred therefore concluded that they may have been “literally falling apart” from decomposition when they went into the pit. “Cambridgeshire was a frontier zone between Mercia and East Anglia, and the continual wars between Saxons and Vikings as they clashed over territory across many decades,” Aldred said. “We suspect the pit may relate to these conflicts.”

Radiocarbon dating links the bones to the ninth century, but no additional artifacts were found in the pit to help narrow down the date range. Historic England plans to commission a new geophysical survey of the area to learn more about the burial. A Cambridge team will go to work on bone analysis, including ancient DNA and isotopic work, to investigate health, kinship, and ancestral links. The team may also attempt “refitting” to see if they can piece the remains back together to get a more accurate count of buried individuals.

“I would never have expected to find something like this on a student training dig,” said Grace Grandfield, a Cambridge undergraduate, of the literally giant discovery. “It was a shocking contrast to the peaceful site of Wandlebury.”