It’s most likely those troops were mustered by the Emperor Septimus Severus, who himself was born in Roman Libya and became Rome’s first African emperor. The unit was named in honour of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius of Gladiator fame and could well have been up to 500 strong. This inscription along with another piece of evidence, a list of Roman dignitaries, both refer to a unit of “Aurelian Moors”, soldiers collected from the Roman province of Mauretania in North Africa, modern Morocco, who had previously garrisoned the fort in the 3rd century. We know this from a 4th century AD inscription discovered at Burgh-by-Sands, close to a fort along the western end of the wall. Isotope analysis showed she had spent her early years in a warmer climate whilst her skull shape suggested she had some North African ancestry.
Buried in a stone coffin her remains were found with ivory bracelets, earrings, pendants and other expensive possessions indicating that she held a high ranking position within Roman York. In 1901 in York, a skeleton, who would later be called the “Ivory Bangle Lady”, was discovered and subsequently dated to the second half of the 4th century AD. The assumption that any African person living in Britain at this time would have most likely been a slave is contradicted by the next discovery. Not only is she the first black Briton known to us, her discovery suggests that people from beyond the North African Roman border were also present in Britain at this time. Through modern forensic techniques including isotope analysis, radiocarbon dating and facial reconstruction, it was concluded that this lady had lived around 200-250 AD, was from a Roman area in the south-east of England, had died in her early twenties and had sub-Saharan African ancestry. It wasn’t until 2014 though that her identity was revealed.
In 1953, an ancient skeleton was discovered in the East Sussex beauty spot of Beachy Head.
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