The Woman and Three Babies History Cold Case

At Dundee's Centre for Anatomy and Human Identification,

the History Cold Case team prepares for an astonishing new case.

The archaeologists have asked us to come in and assist on some of the cases.

"It's the one that nobody else solved. Can you make a difference?"

The investigation will be led by world-renowned forensic anthropologist Prof Sue Black,

while Dr Xanthe Mallett scours the UK for historical evidence

and Prof Caroline Wilkinson rebuilds the faces of the dead.

-I've got a team of world-renowned reputation.

-This case will take the team back nearly 2,000 years

to a time of invasion and great upheaval in Britain.

Today's case which is Roman Baldock. Oh, my goodness me.

-A female found buried with three babies.

-This is an unprecedented archaeological find.

The remains of a woman and three babies, discovered in a sinister position within a single grave.

-It doesn't look so much disrespectful as careless.

-Rushed.

By forensically reconstructing the fate of this woman,

can we gain crucial new information about why she died?

And how will her story change our views of the past?

It's difficult. It's very easy to kill a baby and leave no marks.

A time of brutal medicine.

-It looks vicious.

-That's for perforating a skull.

-And rife superstition.

-If you were getting ghosts, take the head off and there's no trouble.

When survival was far from guaranteed.

As a result, all of them, all four of them have died.

This is the kind of story that will resonate with any parent.

That's basically infanticide.

The History Cold Case team has come to Baldock, a Hertfordshire commuter town with a hidden past.

They set up their mobile forensic lab on Clothall Common,

where people have lived for over 5,000 years.

Iron Age remains have been uncovered around here, which suggest Baldock may be the earliest town

ever to develop in Britain.

Members of the local archaeological community

are laying out a selection of skeletons found here in 1989.

This investigation will focus on the troubling remains from one grave -

a female buried with three tiny babies in what looks like suspicious circumstances.

Who were they?

And how did they all end up dead in the same grave?

Dr Xanthe Mallett is on site first.

She meets archaeologist Keith Fitzpatrick-Matthews,

who supervised excavations of the area and called in the History Cold Case team.

There's a late Roman cemetery under the tents, a temple over there,

more burials over there. So we're really in a necropolis, almost.

The dating of the burials to the Romano-British period is based on artefacts found in the graves.

One of the graves had this rather nice little 1st century AD jar.

Because it's a fairly early style, we can be certain

that most of the graves were of the Roman period. That's very early on.

Keith takes Xanthe to the nearby housing estate where the female and babies were unearthed.

Now this looks very suburban, but I guess it didn't back then.

Absolutely not. When we were excavating, this was open land.

It had been farmland for centuries.

This is an aerial photograph taken when it was still being farmed.

The site of the burial is just there, which puts it underneath those garages.

-So we're really close.

-Very close.

The archaeologists thought they were excavating the body of a man.

Then the dig took an unusual turn.

-Once we'd excavated his grave, it became apparent there was another grave underneath.

-Oh?

And beneath his head and shoulders were the head and shoulders of the woman.

-Right.

-Lying at right angles to him.

That's where it got really interesting. Once we were uncovering her head and upper chest,

the first baby turned up.

As the dig continued, it became clear there was a second, then a third set of infant remains

in the grave with the woman.

Finding three babies together in a grave this old was an unprecedented discovery.

Professor Sue Black flies in from Dundee HQ to see the remains for herself.

They're hoping the bones will provide answers

as to whether this is a 2,000-year-old natural tragedy or, in fact, something more sinister.

Sue immediately notices that the skeletons appear to be remarkably intact, which is promising.

They're in very good condition.

They begin their analysis on the first of the two boxes containing the remains of the woman.

-Oh.

-OK.

-Who knows what we'll find?

-It's like opening Christmas parcels.

Yes, it's definitely a lady. That's very feminine. My goodness.

-Gradually, they start to build her physical profile.

-It's a very short tibia.

That's very short.

-We have to see how tall she would have been.

-So... that's coming in at 31.

So 31. Just short of five foot, so it's coming to sort of 4 foot 11 sort of range.

So very short.

S1 and S2.

So we're over the twenties barrier. We're probably up into the thirties barrier. Yeah.

Teeny weeny legs! Apart from that, no pathologies or traumas.

-Very feminine pelvis, though.

-So we're happy female, happy adult.

-Yeah.

-Young adult.

A woman only 4 foot 11 tall,

in her mid to late thirties, with no obvious cause of death.

Then there are the extraordinary remains of the first baby.

-Oh, my...!

-Oh, wow.

Aww.

Yeah, in severe fragments.

That is...

-a tibia.

-Mm-hm.

-It is.

-I'll take your word for it.

-Thank you. That is a...

It looks like the humerus. It's very difficult to tell.

These are vertebrae. Aren't those beautiful?

-It's like that game of jacks you used to play. That's what they look like.

-Very cute, aren't they?

Reading bones this small and this old is incredibly difficult.

And there is a second tiny skeleton.

What's this, 7683? Oh, there's a lot less of this, by the looks of it.

And then the third, recovered from the same grave.

Oh, now this one is much better preservation. Look at that.

-Relatively good condition.

-That's pretty good, actually.

-I have to say they're fantastic.

-It's amazing, isn't it?

Although Sue is a world authority on juvenile anthropology,

she has never faced a challenge like this before.

You can't tell if they're boys or girls. They're not pink or blue.

Forensically, the things that we look for are any injuries, any trauma,

anything that may show that the child has been despatched.

-But it's very easy to kill a baby and leave no marks.

-It's quite an interesting one, isn't it?

Who was this woman? Are these her babies?

And if so, why would a mother and all three babies end up dead and buried together?

The team will need to gather every bit of forensic evidence they can muster to prove what happened here.

Scientific testing gets immediately underway in the mobile lab.

A sample taken from the thigh bone of the woman will be used for carbon dating

to confirm whether these bones are indeed from the early Roman era.

The same sample will also provide a chemical profile that can reveal where the woman is from

as well as crucial information about her diet.

And adult and baby bones are also sent for DNA testing.

The only way we're ever going to really know whether they are related is if we can extract any DNA.

They're in a good condition, but not a perfect condition.

We have to be realistic that we might not get DNA samples from them.

But if we do, confirming that the DNA of all three babies matches would be fantastic.

Matching it to what we think is a female skeleton is even better.

Alongside rebuilding the woman's face, this battery of tests will help create a profile of her in life

that will be crucial in cracking this mysterious case.

There are so many questions to be answered in this case. Who was she?

Why was she buried in that way?

In the meantime, Xanthe's task is to initiate the historic investigation.

If our woman lived and died in Baldock nearly 2,000 years ago,

what kind of town could it have been?

She meets up with Dr Jeremy Taylor, an expert on Romano-British history.

So we're looking at 1st century Baldock. What would it have been like?

-A bit of a Wild West town.

-Really?

-At that point, yeah.

Until it settled down and local government was organised, the rules were changing very rapidly

and civil government was being re-established after the conquest.

So thinking as if we can see Roman Baldock in front of us, what kind of people are using it?

They're a magnet for people from all walks of life, coming as traders,

artisans, craftsmen, following in the wake of the Roman army and administration,

-hoping to make a living.

-So she could have been from anywhere, doing anything.

-Pretty much, yeah.

It's not what Xanthe wanted to hear.

Our woman could have been a local Celt, but she could also have been a Roman

from literally anywhere across the Empire.

The isotope results will hopefully help to pin this down.

None of Baldock's Roman buildings remain,

but below the surface of this football pitch are the foundations of a huge temple in the town centre.

-Oh, excellent. Look at that.

-On excavations of temple sites

-we find chickens being sacrificed, but also sheep, sometimes pig.

-Quite large mammals.

It can be. Sheep and goats are sacrificed.

This is the centre of religious life here. People come from the local area

but also people travelling on the Roman roads also stop here.

There's a good chance, then, that the woman would have visited this site.

-It's very likely she would have come here at some point.

-That's exciting.

Baldock in the 1st century was clearly a volatile place,

rife with religious superstition and clashing cultures.

Could the new Roman cult religions that increasingly dominated this area after the conquest in 43AD

have played a role in how our woman and the infants lived and died?

First, the team needs to find out whether she even lived during this period.

Back at Dundee HQ, Xanthe joins Sue and Professor Caroline Wilkinson

to hear the results of the carbon dating tests.

-Previously, the only thing dating it was the grave goods.

-They didn't do carbon dating before?

-No.

The carbon dating covers a span from 6AD

to as late as 215AD.

So that's right bang in the middle of when the Romans were officially in Britain and coming to it.

There's a lot of moving about at this time so she could have come from anywhere.

-We don't have the isotopes yet?

-Not yet. That'll be quite interesting. And we don't have the DNA yet either.

That's the first hard scientific evidence and it agrees with what we'd been expecting.

-We like it when things agree. Not everybody does, but we like it. Makes me feel comfortable.

-Yes.

These results place our woman and the babies firmly within a timeframe

when Baldock was under heavy Roman influence.

By 215AD, the Romans had brought their entire culture to Britain -

legal and political systems, architecture, a vast network of military highways,

as well as their social attitudes and superstitions.

When the woman's grave was first excavated in 1989, it was singled out as different from other burials,

but was this only because of the presence of the babies?

I've got a visual I can show you from the information we received from the archaeologist,

which will really help actually. One of these lovely CGI moments.

-So this is looking at the graveyard.

-And are these roads?

-Yes.

-Where's the rest of the cemetery?

-The rest is part way down here, across the road on the other side.

-What we're looking at there is the male overlaying.

-The male.

-Yeah.

And then we'll go down a layer.

So you can see the baby at the shoulder,

the second and the third.

It does make you think about things at a slightly different angle.

With Mum being laid on her side,

is that telling us something about how she's viewed?

If you look at the male, he's on his back, in what you'd expect, lying.

She is placed differently. I don't know how important actual physical positioning was at the time,

whether that means quite a lot that she's placed like that.

There is something odd about the position of the woman's skeleton that makes the team uncomfortable.

Xanthe returns to Baldock to discuss the burial site in more detail with archaeologist Keith.

-We're going to have a look at some of the images from the grave.

-Yes.

-I'm quite looking forward to these.

-So there she is.

-Right.

-Laid out in the grave.

This looks unusual to me by the fact that I would expect her just to be lying on her back.

It is relatively unusual, both in terms of where it is in the cemetery

-and in terms of the way the body was laid out in the grave.

-OK.

-Where it was in the cemetery?

-We're on the edge, almost on her own.

Not quite, but it's very much a peripheral position in the cemetery.

She's also been laid on her right side. There aren't any in precisely this position.

This is a one-off.

-Is there a descriptor for this?

-Because of her unusual position, we would tend, as archaeologists,

to describe this as a deviant burial.

Not meaning that there's anything deviant about her as a person,

but that as a burial it falls outside the statistical norms.

-So literally unusual.

-Unusual.

And socially, perhaps, a bit...

..unacceptable.

Why was she not given a normal burial? Was she herself judged to be deviant?

And, if so, why?

-I don't know if you can make out up there the baby by the right shoulder.

-I can just see it in there.

In a deeply superstitious society, could she have been somehow deemed responsible for the babies' death,

-which might explain why they were all buried together?

-Sad.

-Very sad.

A key part of the woman's physical profile will be provided by Caroline's physical reconstruction.

Quite a strong brow for a woman.

And the good news is we've got some nasal bones,

which means...

..that we can predict how much her nose projects.

There we go. So that fits there between the orbits.

Caroline always begins with a close examination of the skull parts,

especially complex in this case given how old and fragmentary the bones are.

It's quite useful to be able to slot some of the pieces together before we scan them.

When you do it by hand, you can feel how they slot together.

The mandible is quite...square.

Square chin, square jaw.

So quite a masculine-looking woman.

Not typically female.

She captures the fractured pieces using a 3D laser scanner,

as the skull will be reassembled in the computer.

It will take several weeks to bring the face of this woman back into view,

but will it turn out to be the face of a social outcast?

The suggestion is that this woman is dealt with almost as if she's a deviant in some way.

Is that supporting the suggestion that perhaps they're outsiders?

The whole thing just smacks of a bit of disrespect.

And in today's society I don't quite understand why that should be.

To find out more about whether our woman was considered different,

Xanthe travels to London to meet Alison Taylor, an authority on deviant burial in Roman Britain.

-Hi.

-Hi.

Can you tell me a little bit about deviant burials and what that means? I'm presuming she's Roman.

Right, yeah. Looking at what we call the deviant burial, it might've been someone they were worried about.

-Worried about?

-Somebody who they may think the spirit would have walked, somebody who was outside the normal

-for some reason.

-Something suspicious.

-Somebody whose ghost you might fear for some reason,

maybe just because that person was very unfortunate.

And Alison knows of some bizarre attempts to stop people coming back from the dead.

-This one looks a bit odd.

-Yeah. This one has her legs resting on a horse's head.

-I wondered what that was! There you go - her legs were actually placed on top.

-On top.

But Alison believes deviant burials from Romano-British times took two main forms.

The first - decapitation.

Quite a number of people did lose their head.

It seems to have been done usually straight after death. There are cut marks on the neck.

And we do know from later accounts of this sort of burial

that if somebody was giving trouble, if you were getting ghosts,

if you take the head off, you know that person won't cause you trouble.

And the second main type was known as a prone burial.

There's a long tradition of that being seen as very disapproving.

You get that in lots of different cultures, lots of periods of history, right through the Middle Ages,

for certain people. It seems that what they really don't want is this person getting out of the grave

to go and cause trouble haunting. So if you're buried face down,

if you do come back to life and want to get out, you'll go deeper down.

This would seem to match our woman.

What does Alison make of her burial position?

She's obviously highly unusual,

-but I would say this would not classify as a deviant burial.

-Really?

-In any of the normal classifications.

-She's kind of leaning forward, but you don't think that's deviant?

-It's not face down.

-No.

-She's buried on her side.

And her legs are slightly bent.

I think she is simply buried in what is almost a comfortable sleeping position.

Surprisingly, Alison actually thinks this is the normal burial of a heavily pregnant woman.

She is just laid in the ground in the most comfortable position.

You couldn't have buried her face down if she was heavily pregnant. It doesn't bear thinking about.

It was probably the most practical, easy and traditional way of treating her.

Alison believes our woman was probably not an outcast.

She was buried on her side, with all the respect afforded a pregnant woman.

But this is the first historical evidence that a pregnancy may have been involved

and none of the babies appeared to be inside the woman.

So was she pregnant or not?

Back in Dundee, Sue looks for clarification from the bones.

One of the questions often asked is, "Are there indicators on a skeleton of a woman who's been pregnant?

"Is there anything left behind?" Most of the changes are soft tissue.

We used to say that if you can see that groove there, in one area of the pelvis,

at the back of the pelvis, that's an indication they were pregnant.

We've completely thrown that out the window, but it would make an awfully nice story

if we could say just because that's there, we know she was pregnant. That's not the case.

It would be awfully nice if we had something on here that said, "This was her 24th pregnancy."

There's nothing.

The mother gives no clue,

but what of the babies themselves?

Maximum length.

When you have multiple pregnancies, often the babies are smaller.

That's 40 weeks. It's a new-born baby.

These three babies are aged around the time they would have been born,

making it highly likely this is a mother and her three babies.

Astonishingly, as they're also all of a similar size,

it's probable they were from the same pregnancy, making them triplets.

Only the DNA results will be able to prove this beyond doubt,

but it brings the bones alive for Sue.

Those are three full-term babies.

These have gone to their full duration. Maybe not quite 40 weeks, but close.

If you imagine the connotations that has for her, being a little woman, not of a very young age,

carrying three full-term babies.

The implications for her and for the people around her, that's a huge story.

It's a crucial turn in the investigation.

This could be the oldest archaeological evidence of triplets ever discovered.

To find out more, the team must now shift its focus and view this as a multiple pregnancy.

Only one in 80 pregnancies is with twins

and only one in 8,000 is with triplets.

In Ancient Rome, successful multiple births surviving to adulthood

were generally seen as a good omen and became part of mythology,

like the twins, Romulus and Remus, who founded Rome.

And there was even a heroic set of legendary triplets, the Horatii,

known as the Champions of Rome.

But what were the chances of our mother giving birth successfully to triplets in Roman Britain

nearly 2,000 years ago?

How were women treated in difficult childbirths in that time?

How did they deal with that? What was the mechanism? What medical help was there?

Was there anything or was she just on her own?

Xanthe travels to the British Museum in London to meet curator Ralph Jackson,

-an expert in Ancient Roman medicine.

-What level of understanding did they have of the anatomy?

Well, quite good in the kind of harder parts,

but not too good deep inside in the profound and softer parts.

-So more superficial anatomy.

-Bones and superficial anatomy,

simply because there was no dissection of human cadavers.

This was not routinely done. So internal anatomy was patchily understood.

Ralph has a wide array of surgical tools used during Roman times.

It seems like quite a range. This is what I would expect to see in a field kit now,

an emergency field kit.

This is one of the amazing things.

When you look back and forward again, you find that the instrumentation hasn't changed hugely.

-In the basic kit, you have knives...

-Very similar to scalpels today.

With a huge range of different types of blade.

There were a range of probes

and then sharp hooks used for retracting the edges of wounds and incisions.

They are precision-made tools, beautifully finished.

Some instruments would even combine the practical with the divine.

Over here, a folding handle for a drill

includes the sort of mortal side if you like. It's a precision tool,

but at the end there is a bit of decoration - a snake head.

Why would you find a snake head on the end of a drill?

It's because the snake was the creature of Asclepius.

Asclepius was the great, overarching, healing god.

If you put his creature on the end of your tool, the operator and the patient feel reassured.

-This is a real combination?

-It is a real combination of divine and mortal healing.

Is this a medic's toolkit or is this a midwife's toolkit and was there any difference?

There was a difference. It is a medical kit,

a basic kit of surgical tools used for all routine surgery.

The midwife could have had instrumentation

because although midwives by definition tended to look after women expecting babies,

they also were expected to have knowledge

of other aspects of medicine and that included surgery.

Our pregnant woman in Roman Baldock could have had surprisingly advanced medical care available to her.

We had people who came to Britain with written texts that talked about medicine

and some of those were connected to childbirth,

so we can't deny the possibility of knowledge of classical medicine, the text, techniques, in Roman Britain,

not just in Roman Britain, but in Roman Baldock.

Yet something went terribly wrong.

All three babies, along with their mother, were in the grave together.

Why?

In Dundee, Caroline has now reassembled the skull of our four foot eleven woman.

You can see here she's got quite a prominent lump above her eyes,

quite a strong brow for a woman.

We've also got quite prominent bone surfaces here.

It suggests she didn't have small, delicate ears. She may have had quite large, prominent ears.

She might have an interesting face.

I wouldn't go as far as to say she's going to be unattractive.

I think that might be a bit harsh.

With the skull reassembled, only the green areas are missing

which can be estimated by mirroring the opposite side.

So what effect would pregnancy have on the woman's face?

Well, often when women are pregnant, they become fuller of face

and usually later in the pregnancy it's more noticeable.

But that's based on contemporary pregnant faces

and obviously we're well fed and pampered in relation to people from this period of time,

so I don't know how much of an effect her pregnancy would have had on her face.

If the isotope results come back that she was well nourished, it raises the question

of why a healthy, pregnant woman would end up dead, along with all three babies.

The team now hunts for clues in the babies' burial positions.

The larger baby that was...

When excavated, one baby was found underneath the woman,

one between her legs and one near her shoulder.

It doesn't look so much disrespectful as careless to me.

-Rushed, careless.

-I don't know.

I just don't like that. I don't like a baby up on her shoulder

-because you wouldn't bury somebody with a baby there.

-No.

-You just wouldn't. It's an odd placement.

One of the babies was found at her shoulder and I don't quite understand why you would do that.

You would think if you were burying a mother with her baby, it might be across her chest or in her arms.

There's almost an element of discarding.

Is there a cause of death that could explain

why all three babies ended up dead and appear to be almost discarded?

Xanthe goes to the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists in London to meet Dr Helen King,

an expert in Roman birthing and childcare.

-Helen...

-Hello.

-Helen offers a shocking possibility for what may have happened to the babies.

In Roman terms, there was a ceremony after birth

where the father of the child had to pick the child up from the ground.

If he did that, it indicated the child was "worth the rearing", is how they put it.

-The father decided how the baby was treated?

-Yes, and whether it's exposed or not.

This kind of idea of exposing a child, what's that?

Well, exposure means that you leave the child to die after it's been born.

Although it sounds pretty weird to us, in Greek and Roman terms, that's just a very late abortion.

-That's basically infanticide if you abandon a child.

-In our terms, yes.

As far as they're concerned, you've found out the gender of the child, whether it's healthy.

-So, physical disability?

-That's right, but also interestingly, how the pregnancy went.

If the pregnancy was a healthy one, then that's more likely that the child's worth rearing.

It's possible one or even more of the babies could have been the victims of infanticide -

their bodies just dumped in the grave.

But Helen knows of certain Roman birthing techniques

that could also have been responsible for the babies' deaths.

-Do you know what that is?

-Well, my imagination is telling me nothing good.

-It looks pretty vicious.

-That is for perforating the skull.

-To kill the baby?

-It would kill the baby, but it would also release the material inside the skull.

-You're trying to reduce the contents of the skull.

-You'd kind of pierce the skull through the soft part,

-kind of mash the brain around to break it down, so the baby would pass out more easily?

-Yes.

-So where the head's got stuck, it was just a very large head...

-This is what you would do?

-Absolutely.

-There's no chance of a baby surviving with that one?

-No, but the mother might survive.

-If you left the baby there...

-The mother will die.

-Yes.

-Then there were these. You know what that is?

-This would go in through the soft area on top of the head

-and basically hook the baby out.

-That's pretty well it.

-Or you could do it through the eye cavity.

-Any orifice?

-Anything you can grab, really, to pull.

That's pretty nasty, isn't it?

Well, it is, but if the alternative is the woman is going to die, then this could be a life-saver.

This baby here... This is actually where the head's been left behind.

-Oh, nice(!)

-You're grabbing into the mouth and exerting traction from there.

-It's gone wrong at this stage.

-Terribly wrong.

-They're extracting what's left of the baby.

-Exactly.

-It's a great image though.

-We know that the Romans had access to texts

which talked about using hooks to extract babies that are in a difficult position,

so if she does come from a Roman background or has access to Roman help,

she could have had that instrumental interference in her delivery.

Are there any signs of intervention in our case

that would indicate midwives had to deal with a difficult birth?

In Dundee, the bones of the three babies and the woman are put through a CT scanner.

This will look outside and inside the bones

to reveal damage that can't be detected just with physical examination.

Sue then analyses the results with her colleague Roos.

First, they look at the female's scans.

The pelvis is like a basin that's wide at the top and narrow at the bottom.

What we haven't got intact is the bottom end. There isn't enough.

So she's not going to tell us.

The female's bones are strong and healthy, but show no signs of intervention.

What of the babies?

The trouble is there's no skull there.

-There's really nothing. It's tantalising.

-It's difficult to tell.

There's nothing that suggests there's anything going on there.

We can't tell from this that she's had any obstetric assistance of any kind.

Again there are no marks on the bones to indicate use of Roman instruments or medical assistance.

There's no evidence on the remains of the babies

of trauma of any kind that might be associated with somebody trying to assist the birthing process.

So Mum's not helping us with the birthing process

and the babies aren't helping us with it.

It's a frustrating situation.

But can the woman's remains help to shed light on this in another way?

Chemical traces in her bones could reveal whether she was Roman or Celtic,

which may in turn suggest what type of midwifery she would have had access to.

The results of the stable isotope analysis are now back.

We don't know the genetic relationship yet. We're postulating the babies are hers,

but I do have the isotopic results, so it's going to tell us about their diet, their provenance.

This is really all hinging on are they Roman or are they local or what?

That's going to have a massive impact on the whole case.

Her diet is standard terrestrial, very low marine, which is exactly what you'd expect for that area,

so it's unexciting, but it does pin her down...

It's a mixed diet of presumably a bit of marine, a bit of fish, a bit of grain?

Yeah, but mostly the grain element, very minimal kind of marine.

In terms of where she came from,

geographical banding is looking at southern England through to the central, western area.

Again it corresponds with Baldock, so in terms of diet and provenance, she's local.

If our woman was from a local tribe

without access to Roman medicine,

it was far more likely she would have had to try and give birth without intervention.

Is natural childbirth to triplets now the most likely cause of death for this woman?

To find out just how dangerous it is to try and give birth to triplets naturally,

Xanthe goes to Queen Charlotte's Maternity Hospital in London

which deals with more multiple births than anywhere else in the country.

Hi, Xanthe. Nice to meet you.

She meets chief obstetrician, Dr Sailesh Kumar.

-Hi, Charlotte.

-Hi.

-This is Xanthe.

-Hello. Pleased to meet you.

-And you.

You're having a scan because you've got three, haven't you?

-That's right.

-Just to check the growth of the babies.

Dr Kumar is performing a health check on mother Charlotte, heavily pregnant with her own triplets.

-How far on are you?

-25 weeks and a few days.

Triplets grow at the same rate as a single baby, putting much more pressure on the womb.

Do they kind of fight for space?

I know they kick each other.

So this little one weighs about 753 grams.

And all the measurements equivalent to about 25 and a half weeks are pretty much spot-on.

One of Charlotte's babies is in breech position, meaning feet or bottom down,

a much more difficult position to give birth to a baby.

How normal is this in triplet childbirth?

-Is that what you'd expect with triplets, one being in breech?

-Yeah.

It would be unusual for all three babies to be head down

because there's a limited amount of space within the uterus,

so frequently you get one baby head down, the other baby lying across, the third baby in a breech position.

-So carrying triplets, you'd never give birth naturally?

-It would be highly unusual these days.

-It's too dangerous?

-Yes.

Charlotte's triplets are progressing nicely, but there will be major medical intervention,

including a Caesarean section to help her give birth.

All three babies seem to be doing well. I'll just let you listen to a baby's heart.

ECHOING SOUNDS

But what of our mother and her three full-term babies 2,000 years ago

in Romano Britain?

In Dundee, Sue has gone back to the bones for one final examination.

One of the babies becoming stuck in the birth canal, known as breech position,

is the biggest threat to life in triple births.

Yet according to their positions in the grave, none of our babies were found in the birth canal.

So the overlays that Xanthe showed us in the briefing that came from the archaeologists are here.

If we just have a quick look at those, this is Mum laid out in the burial outline.

If you put the babies then in the rough position of the babies,

the first one is sitting here towards her shoulder,

the second baby is sitting down in here,

between her thighs, a quite unusual place to find a baby.

It's quite difficult to explain what that's about.

But critically, Sue now believes the position of the second baby,

previously thought to have been born and outside the mother, is misleading.

Now, if this baby is found outside Mum's cavity,

you have to say, "Well, was the baby born?" Not necessarily.

Because if Mum dies while Baby is still trying to be born,

then obviously that baby stays within the pelvic canal, within the birth canal.

As Mum decomposes,

inside her gut she creates a lot of gas

and a lot of gas inside her actually causes a rise in pressure inside her abdomen

and she can expel the baby after she's dead because of the rise in gases.

But because the baby's decomposing as well, it's much easier for it to get through the birth canal as well,

so that this found outside Mum doesn't mean that when she died, it was outside Mum.

If the baby was stuck in the birth canal,

only to be expelled through what's called a coffin birth,

this could explain how that baby and the mother died.

And there's another revelation.

Sue believes that baby number three was not found merely under the mother.

It was still in the womb when it died.

This little person here, nobody ever knew it existed

because this one was still waiting to be born. This is their secret child.

She wouldn't have known it was there.

We're the only ones that know that this baby existed.

And the breech birth that killed the mother and two of the babies

could also have indirectly led to the death of the baby that was born, found on the mother's shoulder.

She'd already had one baby. That baby would have survived her,

but if there isn't anyone to feed that baby, then that could have been an extra problem.

But also babies who aren't with Mum are in a very, very dangerous position.

Even if this baby was born alive, without its mother, perhaps the odds were against its survival

which might explain why it too ended up in the grave along with its siblings.

So all four deaths could have come from one breech birth.

And Sue has an astonishing X-ray from the 1950s

that graphically illustrates exactly how a breech birth could have had such fatal consequences.

It's a full-term foetus, so there's the baby's head.

There's the baby's vertebral column coming down there. There's one of its legs with a foot up here.

Babies really don't bend well in the middle. That width isn't going to go through there.

-There's no space in there.

-No.

And that's just with one that's gone to full-term.

You imagine you've given birth to one, head down, and off it's gone.

You've still got this one in here in this kind of a position

and there's a third one in line still waiting to come out.

She's not going to do it. She'll spend two, three days in labour,

desperately trying to push out, getting weaker and weaker, and eventually she'll die.

And as a result, all of them, all four of them have died.

It's a tragic scenario,

but until the DNA shows beyond doubt that the babies actually belong to the woman,

it remains unproven.

But who was she?

The isotope results have already shown the woman grew up in the local region.

So if she was from a Celtic tribe, what were the likely circumstances of the pregnancy?

Xanthe goes to the Bath House at Segedunum near Newcastle

to meet historian Lindsay Allason-Jones,

an expert on the lives of women in Romano Britain.

The tribe local to Baldock were called the Catuvellauni

and there is evidence of how women from this tribe may have lived,

including a surprising array of birth control options.

-Oh, that's vinegar.

-It is.

-If you soak sheep's wool in vinegar and use it as a vaginal pessary...

-Would it have worked?

-Yes.

-It wouldn't have smelt very nice.

-No, but perhaps slightly better would be the olive oil

and this, which is alum.

-What's this?

-This is a mineral which would have been ground up and used as a paste within a pessary.

If you stuck to it, if you made sure that you were using it properly

and you always did it, then it would have worked.

According to Lindsay, these techniques and the fact that our woman was in her late 30s

make her pregnancy unlikely to be a mistake.

-Do you think the woman in Baldock would have been married?

-Yes, most people were married.

Celtic law saw a marriage between a man and a woman as a partnership

-and they would go through life as life partners.

-That's very romantic.

You imagine they would have had loads of children running around.

No, in Roman Britain, the evidence suggests they are controlling the size of their families

and most families are having two or three children.

Would it have been a shock? She's that much older to be a mother.

It is quite late to be having children in the Roman period.

This may be the result of a second marriage. Second marriages were quite common.

But who might she have been married to?

Surprisingly, Lindsay thinks it could have been the man buried just above her.

The fact that they're actually one on top of the other at right angles and very closely aligned,

I suspect suggests that this is her husband who knows where his wife is buried and wants to be with her.

-So it wouldn't have been an accident that somebody would have been buried above her?

-I don't think it was, no.

It's a real surprise.

Was this man her husband

and the father of the children?

For Sue, it's an intriguing possibility.

Is he involved with her? Does he have any relationship to her at all? We don't know.

But what we can do, if we're lucky, is get enough DNA out of that material

that says, "Can we match DNA?"

And we're back to paternity testing again. Gosh, we're in the news with paternity testing right now.

Here we go, Roman paternity testing. Could he have been Dad?

A bone sample from the male was also sent for DNA testing.

Meanwhile, Caroline is close to discovering what our woman may have looked like.

You can see her face developing in terms of the overall position of the features and the overall shape.

Because she had a normal, healthy diet, that doesn't suggest that she was emaciated,

so we're keeping her at normal stature.

Because of her pregnancy, she may have had a slightly fuller face,

but she's already got quite a square, rounded cheek look to her anyway.

I think she might have a really interesting end product face here.

The case is now reaching a close

with only the key DNA results still to come.

The team goes back to where the bones were found in Baldock

to reveal the details of their investigation to the local community.

Keen to hear their findings are those who excavated the site, experts who have assisted the team

and members of the local community.

It'll be really interesting to see the results of the scientific tests.

We've never had this done with the stuff from Baldock before.

Often as an archaeologist, when you look at skeletons, you do de-humanise them,

so having the facial reconstruction is really an important thing.

To me, this is what the fusion of history and science

and archaeology and medical history and literary studies is all about. This is where it's at.

The nightmare scenario would be discovering that the mother isn't the mother of the triplets.

Feel free. Come and have a look.

What you're looking at is special.

In fact, it is unique.

And we've been very privileged to be allowed to look at these remains.

We think we've got some very interesting information to tell you.

Sue will reveal what the science has brought to the case,

but how will those who have lived with the bones for over 20 years react?

The carbon-14 dating that came back for our lady

was between 6 and 214 AD.

So our individuals are unquestionably in the early Roman period.

What the isotopes tell us was that in terms of their diet,

these are local individuals.

They are local to Baldock.

But she's in her 30s.

She's a late mum.

She may well have been very, very heavily pregnant.

-She's gone to full term. She's gone the full distance.

-Wow!

And she was only four foot eleven.

-There's a lot of weight in there.

-Yeah.

But what of the DNA?

Will these final scientific results prove a familiar link between the woman and the babies?

There's good news

and there's bad with DNA.

I have to admit, looking at the quality of this,

we said on the day the chances of getting DNA out of this are extremely slim,

which just shows how much we don't know.

The DNA from Baby 2 matches with the DNA from Baby 3

which matches with Mum.

We couldn't get any DNA out of Baby 1 which is just so unfair,

but what's the chance that that baby doesn't belong?

It's highly unlikely. It's got to belong to her.

The woman was indeed the mother of the babies,

but was the man the father?

So, paternity testing?

We couldn't get any DNA out of him.

I'm so sorry.

It's a remarkable story of a mother's struggle to give birth to triplets 2,000 years ago.

It's about the journey that she has gone through

in an event that most of us take for granted will result in something that is terribly happy and natural

and will be just fine at the end because that's what we're used to.

Her story isn't quite as successful, but it is incredibly important.

Finally, it falls to Caroline to reveal the mother's face.

To be able to see her face is really quite amazing.

-She's striking. She's definitely striking.

-She's very capable looking.

-The face of a good child-bearer.

-Absolutely.

I like her though. There's something engaging about her.

But her story is complete and in the completion of her story, it's the closure of the case.

I think that we've gone as far as we can.

I'm thrilled. Getting those results is just amazing. It couldn't have been better.

She couldn't survive that with the conditions she was living in,

with the help that was available to her, and that's very striking.

It sort of rounds off a story that was started 20 years ago

and a mystery and an enigma, and it's given us a vast new amount of information. I think that's great.

This case started with a skeleton assumed to be a social outcast,

maybe the victim of a suspicious death.

But it's ended with the profile of a local, healthy and probably married woman,

strong enough to carry three babies to term,

but in the end, the victim of a simple human tragedy -

pregnant with triplets in a time when the odds of surviving were stacked against her.

These extraordinary bones will now be handed back to the community.

The only ever recorded case of Romano-British triplets is now closed.

It is a sad case, but boy, is she important

when it comes to recording how we handled these kinds of multiple births.

And that story has come from the remains,

so we feel very privileged to just have the temporary custodianship of them, so we can work with them.

From this point forward, her story will be remembered.

Subtitles by Subtext for Red Bee Media Ltd 2011

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