The Mystery Viking Mass Execution of Ridgeway Hill

In June 2009, construction workers widening the road between Dorchester and Weymouth on England’s south coast made a grim discovery. Just outside the area archaeologists had been monitoring, bones and skulls began emerging from the earth. When the archaeologists moved in, they found the skeletons of dozens of individuals thrown into a shallow pit in disarray, heaped on one another. Every single one had been beheaded. The skulls were piled together at one end of the grave. It was a mass execution from the Viking Age—and nothing like it had ever been found before.

The accidental discovery

The Ridgeway Hill site sits on high ground roughly halfway between Dorchester and Weymouth, along an ancient routeway that had been used since prehistoric times. The area is rich in Neolithic, Iron Age, and Roman archaeology—Maiden Castle, one of the largest prehistoric earthworks in Britain, lies just a few miles away. So when the first bones appeared, everyone assumed they were Iron Age.