Bournemouth University's first-year archaeology undergraduate students have discovered a family of skeletons located close to the site of a Roman villa in Dorset.

The researchers and students have been excavating fields in Winterborne Kingston, northern Dorset for the last six years as part of the Durotriges Project, which looks at the transition from the late Iron Age to the early Roman period in southern England.

The five individual graves are all aligned to the north and slope downhill, leading archaeologists to believe they belong to the same family over three generations in 70 years.

The bodies found date back to between 300-350 AD, the same time as the villa was built, and geophysical surveys of the area shows a flint and stone pathway leading from the villa directly to the mausoleum in the next field.

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