The mystery of who rests within a Roman sarcophagus found two centuries ago in the shadow of Westminster Abbey may have been solved. An archaeologist now argues that the skeleton found in a fourth-century Roman sarcophagus there does not belong to a Roman at all, but to a medieval abbot who died roughly a millennium ago, reports the Guardian. The limestone sarcophagus, inscribed to a wealthy Roman named Valerius Amandinus, was found in 1820 and dug up in 1869; its lid was removed in 2018, and the skeleton within was radiocarbon-dated to the late 10th or early 11th century.
That lid was modified at some point to bear a distinctly late Anglo-Saxon cross, “indicating that the sarcophagus was reused,” writes Professor Warwick Rodwell, a consultant archaeologist at Westminster Abbey, in a research paper published in the Journal of the British Archaeological Association. The sarcophagus’ grandeur points to a senior church figure, he says: “Nobody of lower rank would have been buried in anything like that” and “the Latin cross again points to a major ecclesiastic.” His shortlist: two abbots of Westminster, Ælfwig and Wulfnoth, with Ælfwig, who died around 1020, the leading candidate.