Archaeologists have recovered a single human skull from the walls of a 2,000-year-old fort in Spain. Their study of the skull reveals that a local soldier was brutally killed by Roman forces, who then decapitated him and placed his head on the walls of a fort as a warning to others.
In the first century B.C., Rome repeatedly waged war against the Cantabri, fierce Celtic warriors who lived in what is now northern Spain, to gain control over the Iberian Peninsula. The Cantabrian Wars (29 to 19 B.C.) were fought in part by the first Roman emperor Octavian (later known as Augustus) himself. During these wars, the Romans prevailed over the Cantabri in the siege of La Loma ("The Hill"), a fortified Celtic town in the modern province of Palencia, in 25 B.C.
