Iron Bangle Lady

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Hello! I’m sorry I’m so late to Black History Month (I got a new job!) but I am going to try and catch up by (optimistically) aiming to post the story of a black woman every day for the remainder of the month! Starting with a short and sweet story from Britain today: The Iron Bangle Lady of York.

In 1901, the grave of a young woman was discovered in Sycamore Terrace York. She had been buried in a stone sarcophagus with very rich grave goods (objects placed into a burial for the afterlife, or as an offering to the dead) in the later 4th century. The objects placed into her grave included bracelets made from local jet and more exotic ones made of ivory. A short inscription on a bone mount, that probably decorated a box, suggests that this high status young woman was a Christian as it says ‘Hail, sister, may you live in God’. 

The shape of her skull suggests that she had North African ancestry; this is not very surprising in a place like York, where inscriptions and written sources mention Africans, even heads of state such as the Emperor Septimius Severus (ruled AD193-211), who was born in what is now Libya and ruled from AD 193-211.

Archaeological scientists analysed the chemical signatures preserved in the skeleton’s teeth and discovered that she was born and brought up in the south of Britain, or Europe, rather than in Africa. There are several possible explanations for this: it is possible that one parent of the Ivory Bangle Lady was from North Africa, but that she grew up in a different part of the Empire.

Discoveries like Iron Bangle Lady are important to highlight that black people have ALWAYS existed in Britain and that they are as much a part of our history as any other race. Particularly, this lady shows us that not all Africans came to Britain as slaves of the rich, but were in fact rulers and high-status individuals themselves, debunking the myth that immigration and “diversity politics” are a recent “politically correct” invention. This seems like a good place to start celebrating BHM, as it is about as historical as you can get without talking about how all humans were originally black (which is a post for another day).

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