Original subtitles

It's one of the greatest defeats in history.

The mighty Roman Empire

brought to its knees by barbarian hordes.

The Vandals, the Goths,

they are described as exceeding all savagery

with an inhuman desire for violence.

And the Romans blamed one tribe and one man,

as the greatest threat to their civilization--

the Huns, led by the infamous Attila.

The name is legendary.

This is a person who is truly transforming the world.

But the shocking discovery of a cemetery

full of strangely shaped skulls challenges that story.

Fifty-one individuals had very heavily deformed skulls.

Every skull had a very exotic genetic ancestry.

Because it's not the only time

these strange looking people have appeared

during a time of chaos.

This is a phenomenon we see across the world

and throughout human history.

It's the difference between life and death.

Now, a cutting-edge investigation

is revealing the mysteries of these unnatural skulls,

and it rewrites the fall of the Roman Empire.

They say history is written by the victors,

But in this case, that's not accurate.

The relics of the past hold secrets.

Written in Gold.

Stone.

And blood.

We can unlock them.

These are the secrets of history's greatest treasures.

They're one of history's most puzzling

and disturbing mysteries.

Skeletons with bizarre cone-shaped skulls.

This is a phenomenon that we see across the world.

We see it on every continent in Eurasia,

in the South Pacific, in South America,

Central America, North America,

Western Europe throughout history.

Across millennia and around the world,

strangely shaped skulls seem to appear

at times of chaos and violence.

But now an unsettling discovery in the heart of Europe

is shedding new light on a phenomenon

that's perplexed experts for centuries.

Fifty-one individuals have deformed skulls,

and they look different.

In case of very heavily deformed skulls,

they don't even look natural at all.

It's an investigation

that reveals how these skulls from the Roman Empire

fit into the worldwide mystery of deformed heads.

What connects them?

What story do they tell

about the turbulent times

in which they lived and died?

And who were they?

Near the small village of Mozs, Hungary,

lies an unremarkable looking field.

It sits on the edge of what was once the Roman Empire,

just a few miles from its easternmost frontier,

and a recreated Roman border fort.

This region was occupied by the Romans

at the very beginning of the first century AD,

and remained under Roman rule

till the middle of the 5th century.

People living here enjoyed

many advantages of being under Roman rule,

as showed by archaeological finds

from the Roman towns, villas, and forts.

Sixteen hundred years ago,

this was home to a small community,

who buried their dead in a simple cemetery.

Here their secrets lay hidden until 1961.

Archaeologists excavating this ordinary looking field,

unearth a handful of Roman-era graves.

We are standing on the 5th century cemetery right now.

The first burial group in the 60s

was actually found somewhere around that area.

We are standing on top of the second burial ground,

and the third burial ground

is across and under the highway.

The earliest finds

suggest this was a regular Roman cemetery

with bodies neatly buried in stone-lined graves.

But as excavations continue,

it soon becomes clear there was

nothing normal about this cemetery.

A total of 96 burials were unearthed.

Out of the 96 burials,

51 individuals showed signs of deformed skulls.

Each has a strangely elongated skull,

some as much as twice the length of a normal human head.

The skulls have puzzled experts for decades.

But now, archaeologist Istvan Koncz

believes the date of their burial

may provide a critical clue.

The cemetery site is dated

to the middle of the 5th century,

and the 5th century was a very hectic time,

especially in this part of the Roman Empire.

These individuals lived and died

during one of the ancient world's

most turbulent and pivotal times,

the fall of the Roman Empire.

It's a very traumatic period for the Romans.

Rome is sacked in 410.

Rome is sacked again in 455.

I mean the writing is on the wall.

There is real change here,

and it's not going to go back to the way it was before.

At its height,

the Roman Empire stretched from Britain

through Germany and Eastern Europe,

to Syria and North Africa.

Controlled by rigorously efficient bureaucracy

and ruthless military might,

this vast sophisticated civilization seemed invincible.

But it wasn't.

In the 5th century the outsiders

are pushing into that empire,

and it starts to fragment.

According to Roman writers,

it was these outsiders who caused the empire's collapse.

Savage barbarian hordes

who swarmed across Rome's borders,

including those led by the infamous Attila the Hun.

The Roman accounts from this period blame

so-called barbarians at the gates.

The idea that the Roman Empire

was invaded by outside forces,

and that's why it fell.

According to these accounts,

the Barbarians overran the empire's eastern frontier,

plunging it into chaos and violence.

Shortly afterwards,

the first strangely shaped skulls appeared

just six miles from this frontier

in the cemetery at Mozs,

and it seems this wasn't a coincidence,

because over the following decades,

as the Roman Empire crumbled,

more and more people with deformed skulls

were buried in the same small patch of land.

Cranial deformation is not present

in the burials of the founding generation.

But later 70% of the individuals

show deformed skulls.

It becomes very, very common.

The remains suggest people with

cone-shaped skulls were taking over this outpost

on the edge of the crumbling Roman Empire.

Were these the infamous invaders

that Roman historians blamed for the empire's collapse?

Roman accounts present us with a picture

of widespread destruction of Roman provinces and cities

by groups which the Romans collectively termed barbarians.

They are supposedly uncultured, savage.

They invaded and brought down

the civilized world of the Romans.

The skulls are in the right place

at the right time.

They seem to fit with the picture painted by Roman writers

of violent savages invading from the east.

But as archaeologists investigate further,

something doesn't add up.

The remains do not show any evidence of violence.

These bones bear none of the injuries

experts would expect to see

if they belonged to warriors who lived by the sword,

and of a total of 96 graves, only one contained a weapon.

It's very surprising because these are,

of course, very turbulent, hectic times.

The evidence from Mozs seems

to contradict written accounts of the period.

The burials of Mozs tell us a story

that's not in the written or historical sources.

It tells us a different story.

What is that story?

How do these strangely shaped skulls fit into it?

To find the answer experts must look

beyond these misty Hungarian fields.

Because the cone-skulled beings found in Mozs,

weren't the first to walk the earth or the last.

Locked in a laboratory in Budapest, Hungary,

lie some of the Roman world's strangest

and most disturbing archaeological finds.

Fifty-one elongated skulls

unearthed in a small cemetery

on the easternmost edge of the Roman Empire.

They date to the period immediately after the Romans

abandoned the region in the first decades

of the 5th century AD.

History records the former frontier

descended into chaos and violence,

and at the same time the number of deformed skulls

in the cemetery increased.

Who were they,

and is there a connection between these skulls,

and the turbulent times in which they were buried?

Experts believe a clue can be found

in other similarly shaped skulls.

This is a phenomenon

that we see across the world and throughout human history.

Matt Velasco has spent years

investigating these mysterious skulls,

and not surprisingly,

he's encountered a host of colorful conspiracy theories

about these strangely shaped ancient remains.

It's not uncommon to

hear references to extra-terrestrials

when one encounters an elongated skull.

But, in fact, this is a quintessentially human practice

that we have evidence of throughout our history.

Forensic analysis of the skeletons from Mozs

and other cone shaped skulls from around the world,

has also established they're not the result

of a genetic abnormality.

These strangely shaped skulls

are the product of human intervention.

Ridges on the skulls of the people from Mozs

suggest their heads been tightly wrapped

and deliberately deformed.

More disturbingly,

this had to have been started

when these individuals were babies.

Head-shaping must happen

during a critical window in infancy,

when the bones of the skull have not yet fused,

and are quite malleable and can be reshaped.

An elongated head would have been achieved

through the binding of the skull around the circumference,

using cloth bandages, for example,

or textile bands that were wrapped around the skull.

The tightly wrapped bindings slowly

squeeze and elongate the malleable infant skull.

When it finally fuses at around three years of age,

the head shape is permanently fixed.

To modern eyes, the end result may be unsettling,

but to the people who practiced cranial modification,

an elongated skull was clearly a desirable feature.

This was seen as a normal, beautiful practice,

and nothing like a deformity as we would see one today.

And remarkably, there appears to have been

no adverse effect on the child's development.

While it may have been bothersome for

a squirming child,

it probably didn't significantly, if at all,

influence their likelihood of survival.

Skull shaping has been found

around the globe and throughout history.

People separated by thousands of miles

and thousands of years created identical looking skulls.

The question is why?

What connects these distant societies?

What compelled people like those in Mozs

to take such a drastic irreversible step?

A clue lies far from the windswept plains

of Eastern Europe,

in the soaring peaks and secret canyons of South America.

In the Andean Highlands,

we have found large burial sites

with hundreds of individuals

that show evidence of this modification.

In Peru's Colca Valley,

inside stone-built tombs,

Velasco and his colleagues have identified 213 skeletons.

Each of them has a modified skull

similar to those in Hungary.

And despite being buried 700 years apart,

both the people of the Colca Valley

and Mozs were buried during violent and uncertain times.

The skeletons I study date to around

1100 AD to 1450 AD.

This is a time period where we see

a lot of evidence of violence,

as people move to hilltop fortifications

to defend their agricultural resources and their families.

This descent into warfare and tribal violence

followed the collapse of two powerful empires.

We see evidence of

social and political fragmentation

in the vacuum left by the collapse of the larger

state society that organized economy, trade,

and other aspects of social life.

Velasco believes there's a connection

between this collapse and violence,

and the modified skulls found in the valley.

Because as the violence increased,

so did the practice of head-shaping.

In the earliest tombs,

those dating before 1300 AD,

around 35 to 40% of individuals had evidence

of artificial cranial modification.

But after 1300 AD,

that number increases dramatically.

A full three-fourths of the population

buried in these above ground tombs,

now shows evidence of the practice.

The people of the Colca Valley

responded to violent instability,

by shaping their infants' heads.

It's evidence that suggests

an increase in head shaping could occur

during times of stress, hardship, and uncertainty.

So is that what was happening in Mozs?

Because just like the people of the Colca Valley,

the inhabitants of Mozs experienced

the collapse of a ruling empire

and the descent into chaos.

In the 5th century along the borders,

that large infrastructure that provided a feeling of safety,

that network and that government and the military,

is not able to do the job that it once did.

It would have given you a real sense of uncertainty

as to what's happening next,

and what's going to happen in the Roman Empire.

But despite the chaos,

the bodies from Mozs show no evidence of injury.

So who were they?

Were they locals from inside the former empire,

or invaders from beyond the frontier?

Now groundbreaking forensic analysis

is unlocking the answers hidden deep inside their bones.

These, along with teeth,

contain a record of what we eat and drink

while our bodies are growing.

Using this, archaeologists can identify

what an individual ate during their childhood

and where they ate it.

So during the project,

we conducted different isotopic analysis.

This information is extracted from the teeth,

and occasionally we are also taking samples

from certain bones, like ribs

or sometimes small parts of the long bones as well.

As plants grow in soil,

they pick up the unique chemical fingerprint of that region.

When humans eat these plants,

these chemicals replace some of the calcium

in their teeth and bones.

For the bodies from Mozs,

one chemical in particular proves critical.

Strontium.

It's an element that's composition

and distribution varies widely in nature.

This geographical variation allows archaeologists

to identify which people in the cemetery were raised locally

and which weren't.

Strontium is really like a fingerprint

of a geographical area.

The strontium analysis reveals

that in the earliest burials dated to around 430 AD,

all the people were local

and all had normal shaped skulls.

But during the following decade this pattern changes.

Most of the people buried in this phase

were local, as expected.

But 12 weren't.

They were outsiders,

and 10 of these had elongated skulls.

And further analysis reveals

they all shared the same diet.

That suggests they probably

came from the same place and moved together.

A decade after the first burials

in the cemetery,

a group of strangers arrived in Mozs.

Twelve died there.

Ten of them with elongated skulls.

They came from outside the crumbling Roman Empire,

and their strange appearance matches Roman descriptions

of monstrous invaders who overran the civilized world,

marauding savages from the uncivilized east.

The Vandals, the Goths, the Huns,

many of these names have outlasted the Roman Empire

and still resonate with us today.

Archaeologists have found dozens

of other cone-shaped skulls

across the empire's former eastern edge.

Suggesting people with elongated skulls

were infiltrating the region,

and not just any people.

Because now startling new scientific evidence

links these people to the most terrifying

of all Rome's enemies,

and one of the most infamous tribes in history.

Fifty-one bodies buried in a small cemetery

on the edge of the crumbling Roman Empire.

Each with a deliberately modified, elongated head.

Scientific analysis identifies 10 of them as outsiders

from beyond the Roman Empire's former frontier.

And this wasn't a freak occurrence.

In recent years archaeologists

have unearthed dozens of skulls

along what was once the eastern edge of the Roman Empire.

All with strikingly similar elongated skulls,

and all dating to the turbulent 5th century.

But with the empire in chaos

and so many tribes pouring across its borders,

identifying who these people were or where they came from,

hasn't been possible until now.

We find these skulls primarily

in that Eastern European area,

Romania, Hungary those kind of areas.

And then you see it expanding a little bit out

towards the west into Germany, into France.

Advanced 21st century DNA analysis

has finally allowed geneticist Krishna Veeramah

to discover the identity

of these mysterious 5th century outsiders.

We're using the DNA that we can get from these individuals

to identify their genetic origins,

and trying to work out where do they come from

if they are not local.

Among these individuals

is a small group of bodies found

in Altenerding, Southern Germany

buried at the same time as the bodies in Mozs

with strikingly similar skulls.

So this is an example of three skeletons

that we were able to get DNA from.

Furthest to the left,

we have the most extreme cranial deformation

amongst all those that we had.

You can see a very much larger skull,

and it's kind of flat at the back.

This extremely elongated skull

offers a tantalizing clue

to the origin of the outsiders buried in Mozs.

The interesting thing about

this particular one on the left was

she had both the most extreme head shape,

but also the most extreme genetic difference

from the local population.

Her body was found in Southern Germany,

but her genetic ancestry points

to an origin thousands of miles to the east.

Her genetic background

has a clear East Asian component to it,

and so she has recent ancestry at least from East Asia.

That doesn't mean she is necessarily born in East Asia.

But she might have parents that have

a strong East Asian ancestry

maybe going back a few generations.

All the other deformed skulls

Veeramah and his team have tested so far,

show similar exotic origins.

This was pretty remarkable.

We didn't expect it to be this clear-cut.

Every deformed skull had a very non-local,

exotic, essentially, genetic ancestry

that suggests that they probably had moved from

somewhere in Eastern Europe or even Central Asia.

The similarity between the skulls studied

by Veeramah and the skulls from Mozs,

strongly suggests both share the same origin in the east,

in an area that gave rise to the most notorious

of all the barbarian tribes, the Huns.

The Huns had a massive nomadic army on a horseback,

originating all the way in Mongolia, in Western China.

But despite their fame or infamy,

very little is known about who the Huns really were.

They had no written language, left no records,

and as nomads they built

no monuments, cities, or settlements.

We don't actually know very much

about the Huns' way of life.

We don't know what language they spoke, really.

We don't know what religion they had,

what their daily life was like.

Almost everything historians

know about the Huns is based on Roman accounts.

From these, it seems that sometime before 370 AD,

the Huns began to move west.

There is some evidence

that it was the climate of the Steppe regions

that forced them to move out of that territory.

The climate was very dry,

and there may have been a drought

which led to famine.

When the Huns left their homeland,

it triggered a chain of events that would lead

from the plains of Asia to the heart of Rome.

The Huns are really seen

as being historically grand disrupters.

As they push west,

they're going to be displacing people,

famously, the Goths.

The Goths who were living there

then moved out into Vandal territory,

which caused the Vandals to migrate as well.

So it's the Huns that are pushing the Goths,

that are then pushing into the empire

like a big domino effect.

As the Huns rampaged across the Roman Empire,

they were led by a leader whose name still resonates today.

Ask anyone about the Huns,

and they will undoubtedly tell you the name Attila.

Attila led the Huns

during the early 5th century.

At the same time as the people

with elongated skulls were buried in Mozs

and across the eastern edge of the empire.

His leadership skills are legendary.

Taking this kind of dispersive, nomadic tribe,

putting them all together into an incredible army,

unstoppable army.

He's remembered as being

a particularly ferocious military general

who infamously invaded the Balkans

and then attacked Italy

and caused the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

There are few contemporary records

of the Huns.

But there is one tantalizing description of Attila

written within a 100 years of the empire's collapse.

We don't have many ancient sources

that tell us about the Huns.

One exception to this

is a precious document

from Jordanes in the 6th century,

and in that account,

he talks specifically of Attila the Hun,

"As a man who was born into the world

to shake the nations as a scourge of all the lands,"

and he says that this was a man who was a lover of war.

This account also describes Attila's features,

including his head.

He describes him as short in stature,

broad of chest, a large head, and small eyes.

So that's our physical description that we have

anywhere

about what Attila the Hun actually looked like.

With large heads like Attila himself

and possible origins in Central or East Asia,

it seems the outsiders buried in the cemetery

at Mozs weren't simply barbarians.

They may have been Huns, the most infamous,

and most feared of all the invading tribes,

and what started as a trickle,

with the arrival of 12 outsiders,

soon became a flood.

As the influence of Rome faded,

the number of deliberately shaped skulls

in the cemetery at Mozs soared,

from zero in the first generation of burials

to the majority just a few decades later.

But when archaeologists turn their attention

to the cemetery's later phase,

they discover something puzzling.

Not all of the people with cone-shaped heads

were outsiders.

As time passed,

an increasing number were locals.

We have evidence of people buried

in brick-lined graves,

which was a Roman custom.

But some of these skeletons

show evidence of cranial modification,

which was something that was supposedly

brought into the region by the Huns.

The evidence suggests

there was something strange going on in Mozs.

The locals, people who may have lived as Roman citizens,

copied a tradition belonging to

an entirely different civilization,

and in doing so,

they allied their children

with Rome's mortal enemies.

Why?

What was it they stood to gain?

The Huns, the most notorious of all the tribes

to invade the Roman Empire.

Today the word Hun strikes fear into people's hearts.

They are remembered as being particularly ferocious warriors

responsible for the decline and fall of the Roman Empire.

Ground-breaking archaeological investigation,

and the latest DNA analysis,

suggests these nomadic warriors

proclaimed their identity in the most extreme way possible.

They deliberately and irreversibly,

shaped their children's heads.

Cranial modification would have been

a very strong marker of their shared identity.

We are literally the same people of the same origin,

and that social identity would have been

written into their bodies.

With countless different tribes

and groups moving through the crumbling empire,

all fighting for power and resources,

a distinctive head would have made it possible

to instantly distinguish friend from foe,

and for the Huns in particular this was crucial.

The Huns themselves were not a single group.

They were multiple, complex societies.

They probably may have moved,

and then added other groups in,

and formed these amalgamations over time.

Under the charismatic leadership of Attila,

the Huns absorbed many of the tribes they encountered

on their journey from the east.

We think that their allegiance was political

rather than racial.

So people who were part of a really

broad diverse group like the Huns,

might have chosen to adopt cranial modification

as a means of identifying themselves.

But now analysis of the bodies

discovered in the 5th century cemetery in Mozs,

suggests the invaders were more diverse

than historians ever imagined.

Grave 86 is a burial of a young, probably, girl,

based on her grave goods.

She also had a deformed skull.

The girl's cone-shaped skull

suggests she could be a Hun.

But her grave goods are distinctly Roman.

She was buried with an earring,

and this is a type that's distributed

all over the Mediterranean.

This is definitely a late Roman form of jewelry.

In keeping with her Roman-style grave goods,

strontium analysis reveals she was born and raised locally,

along with many of the later burials with modified skulls.

Finding locally born children

with evidence of cranial modifications,

suggests that the late Roman community living here

might have taken the decision

to shape their children's skulls

in order to align them with the culture

that had moved into that territory.

The increase in elongated skulls in Mozs

wasn't simply the result of evermore Huns

pouring across the border.

Instead, it was because an increasing number

of locally-born people also had deformed skulls.

And not just in Mozs.

It's definitely not unique to Mozs.

It's probably happened all over the Roman Empire.

Why would the locals,

in former Roman settlements like Mozs,

subject their children to such

an extreme irreversible ordeal?

Why would they align them with the Huns?

A new scientific investigation suggests

the answer may have been as simple

and fundamental as food.

Because the study reveals there was a big difference

between the local Roman diet and that of the Huns.

Isotopic analysis suggests

that the Hunnic diet was rich

in meat and fish and fast-growing millet,

and that the Roman diet was predominantly grains

and much more narrow.

The Huns' meat-rich diet

matches an account of life at the court of Attila,

written by a Roman diplomat,

who visited the fearsome warlord's camp,

somewhere in Hungary in around 448 AD.

The Roman historian, Priscus,

gives us an account

of his visit to Attila's residence

and a luxurious banquet of meat

presented to them on silver plates.

This account suggests that the Hunnic lifestyle

may not have been as unattractive

as many of our other accounts make out.

The Huns' more varied, more nutritious diet,

may help to explain why the people on the edge of empire

chose to join forces with Rome's enemies.

This late Roman community,

living on the edges of the empire, a very unstable place,

might have been attracted to align themselves with the Huns

because of their better diet

and a potentially more secure lifestyle.

The incentive could not have been greater,

because the prize was nothing less

than their children's survival.

One of the reasons we see it at such high frequencies

during these periods of social strife,

is because marking oneself vis-a-vis the other

is of crucial importance.

It's the difference between life and death, potentially.

A child with cranial modification,

may have had access to particular resources,

or may have enjoyed certain social benefits,

that other individuals without a reshaped head

would not have had access to.

And, ultimately, this can lead

to increased chances of survival.

And a better diet wasn't the only thing

the Huns had to offer the people

on the frontline of the empire.

Number one, they're apparently

very successful in warfare.

Number two, they don't seem to be going anywhere,

and number three, them being that new power base,

it would make more sense with the passing of time,

to align yourself and your own interests with those people

versus the powers of Rome that are so at this point far off.

This, could be why the people of Mozs

saw the need to align themselves with the Huns.

They chose the winners over the losers,

food over hunger,

and they elongated their children's skulls

to cement this relationship,

and ensure their survival in this most turbulent of times.

Modifying the head of a child was a way

of permanently inscribing on their body,

a form of privilege.

For the Huns

and the locals who lived alongside them,

an elongated head was more than a mark of identity.

It was a passport to a better, potentially longer life.

The skulls of these children

tell us that as parents,

we would do anything to our children

to provide them a better future.

From this small cemetery

on the farthest edge of the Roman Empire,

a previously untold story is emerging

of the Huns, not as brutal savages,

but as people to be admired and emulated.

This sort of evidence does suggest then

that the simplistic view of in come the invaders

into the empire and go in conquest and move on

is actually much more nuanced.

It seems that at least in Mozs,

the bad guys weren't so bad after all.

They were immigrants, not invaders.

Settlers, not nomads.

We can now go back and reassess what we've learned,

maybe unlearn it, and have a more

sophisticated view of the Huns.

It's clear something strange

was happening on the empire's former frontier.

Something that conflicts with the standard version of events

in which savage barbarians from the east

destroyed Roman civilization

and plunged Europe into the Dark Ages.

How can the history of the Roman Empire's fall from power

enshrined as fact for more than a millennium be wrong?

As the Roman Empire collapsed,

two worlds collided.

Roman writers paint the Huns as bloodthirsty invaders,

hell-bent on destruction.

But now, the discovery of 51 deliberately deformed skulls

in the empire's Eastern reaches,

is revealing a very different picture.

We've had this story presented to us

that with the fall of the Roman Empire

came the collapse of civilization as we know it.

But actually, this is a very inaccurate

representation of what happened.

Of course, there's going to be these flashpoints,

these dramatic moments,

these losses in these battles over centuries.

But really, it's this gradual change,

and pivot into new powers

that were occupying the empire and not going away.

The evidence from Mozs suggests the Huns,

and their fellow Barbarians were a consequence

and not a cause of the Roman Empire's collapse.

There's so many factors then that lead

to the fall of the Roman Empire.

The tax revenue is not there.

That power, the military, it's breaking down.

The empire's complex economy

in which taxation, agriculture, a vast army,

and huge cities all relied on each other was its strength.

But also, its weakness.

Because when things went wrong,

this carefully constructed house of cards collapsed.

And, of course, other people are going to come

and fill in that vacuum.

Some of these people fought, some settled.

But they all shared a common purpose.

The goal of these people is really

sustaining their lives, their economies.

One way is to lead successful military campaigns,

plundering or forcing payments in the form of tribute,

or moving into the area of the empire of settling down

and living off the land.

Instead of invaders,

many of these people were migrants,

or even refugees in search of a better life.

People come inside,

people settle, people interact, people merge,

and so you have this kind of much more complex relationship

that's going on between these conquerors

and then the Romans.

This relationship between these two

supposedly sworn enemies was so strong,

that by the time of the last burials in Mozs,

when almost everyone buried in the cemetery

had an elongated head,

the distinction between invaders

and locals may have ceased to exist.

It's really at a certain point

hard to distinguish you from them,

when you've been interacting with each other for so long.

This evidence really strongly

challenges the idea that the Huns,

or any other invading groups in this period,

simply came in and destroyed the areas that they invaded.

For 1500 years,

the generally accepted story

of Rome's fall from power has been wrong.

The question, is why?

And the answer lies with the original source material.

They say history is written by the victors.

But in this case, that's not accurate.

The written sources that we have of this period

were written by the Romans.

Historians have had to rely on a version

of the empire's collapse written by the losers,

the educated Roman elite,

living 700 miles from the frontier.

We get a really strong sense from them

that they are trying to present their enemies

as more fearsome and terrible,

to make their losses seem less shameful.

To save face,

Roman writers cast the blame on the Huns.

Spinning a story of good Romans versus bad Barbarians,

civilized versus uncivilized.

And with no written language

to preserve the Huns' side of the story,

Roman propaganda became accepted history.

But now, scientific analysis of these extraordinary skulls

is helping archaeologists to see through the spin,

and piece together the reality of ordinary life

in the crumbling Roman Empire.

Archaeology can help us to tell those stories

that need to be told.

About what life was actually

like during historical periods.

Thanks to 51 strangely shaped skulls,

microscopic traces of strontium, carbon, and nitrogen,

tiny variations in genetic code,

and the experience of a radically different culture,

in a different time and place,

the story of the people on the frontline

of men, women, and children,

who experienced the fall of the empire firsthand,

can finally be told.

Sites like Mozs help us to tell the stories

about the people who actually lived

during the transformation of Europe and Asia

from Roman rule into something new.

But the new community in Mozs was short lived.

In 453 AD Attila died,

plunging the Huns' territories into civil war.

In little more than a decade,

their empire disappeared,

and the Huns vanished from contemporary accounts.

There are no burials at Mozs after around 470 AD,

just 40 years after the cemetery was founded.

And the practice of cranial modification

petered out across Europe over the following decades.

So it seems to be that kind of window in time,

in which it was culturally acceptable to a degree,

and then afterwards,

maybe through merger of other peoples or whatnot,

different cultural norms,

it's no longer prevalent.

But this fleeting practice

in this short-lived community leaves a lasting legacy

that reveals for many of the people living in the empire

for many of those arriving from the east

the fall of the Roman Empire wasn't a disaster.

It was an opportunity,

that offered the hope of a new life in a new land

and a better future for all their children.