Archaeologists unravel heartbreaking 2,000-year-old teen ‘murder mystery’ while filming TV show: ‘I could not stop crying’

This case file was extra cold.

Archaeologists are helping unravel a nearly 2,000-year-old teen “murder mystery” that they uncovered while filming a TV show on Britain’s past.

“I turned the face at last to the light and it felt like the person was looking at me,” said TV presenter Sandi Toksvig while describing the Iron Age murder caper, the Independent wrote.

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She and Bournemouth University archaeologist Miles Russell had been filming an episode of the show,” Hidden Wonders,” in which the host and professional and amateur history hunters piece together the stories behind archaeological treasures.

While excavating the domestic dwellings and the cemetery of the Durotriges — a Celtic tribe who lived in Dorset before the Romans — the team happened across the skeleton of a girl lying facedown in the dirt.

“This has the sense of a body thrown into a pit, with hands potentially tied at the wrist” in front of her body, Russell told Livescience. “We think she’s a ‘she’, although we haven’t had a chance to assess the DNA yet in order to clinch it.”

The plot thickened after the team noticed that the victim reportedly sustained injuries to her arms and upper body, indicating that the alleged young woman had been brutalized before her death.

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In addition, she’d been interred facedown and bound — which was not common burial practice at the time — and placed peacefully in the grave, leading researchers to deduce that the age-old stiff had been sacrificed.

Toksvig was overcome with emotion over the fate of the ancient murder victim.

“I could not stop crying … to hold that person’s head in my hands was one of the greatest privileges of my life,” said the TV sleuth, making sure to note that the remains were handled “very carefully.”

This wasn’t the only likely sacrifice victim that was recovered from the repository. Researchers had also found a teenager in 2024 and a young adult female from 2010 whose neck had been slashed.

Russell believed that these finds helped “build up a picture (Durotriges) of how these people lived and died 2,000 years ago.”

Despite the appalling violence toward women, DNA samples from burial sites suggest that the Celtic tribe was matriarchal.

In this female-centric society, women owned the land and men were invited to travel to their wives’ villages to marry rather than the other way around, as was the norm.

Russell suspected that the sacrificed victims may have straddled the lower strata of society and were therefore deemed expendable, especially if they hailed from elsewhere or weren’t related to the ruling class.