The current must-see exhibition at the Museum of London, 150 London Wall, London EC2 (The Missing Link? until 8 August) includes a limestone sarcophagus containing a headless male skeleton. Discovered in the foundations of the church of St Martin-in-the-Fields, just off Trafalgar Square, it has been dated by archaeologists to around
AD 410, the traditional date for the end of Roman rule in Britain. Yet beyond the fact that the man in the coffin was in his forties, of average height and presumably elite status, there is little more that can be deduced with any certainty about him. As is the case with so many finds dredged up from the murk of Roman Britain, the urge to speculate is both encouraged and frustated. A seeming ray of light ends up serving only to highlight the darkness that stretches all around.
And traditionally, of course, confronted by such darkness, it is novelists who have rushed in where academics fear to tread.
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