Iron age remains unearthed near Derbyshire beauty spot
Experts found the corpse, thought be at least 2,000 years old, during an excavation near Monsal Head at Bakewell.
Two members of a history group were digging when they scooped up what they thought might have been a bone at the hill-top fort.
They told archaeological expert Dr Clive Waddington, who was supervising the project, and he identified it as a skull.
Over the next three hours the area was painstakingly excavated and the body, believed to have been thrown in the ditch and piled over with rocks, was removed one bone at a time.
Dr Waddington, a director at Archaeological Research Services, in Bakewell, said last week's find was the first he had come across in Derbyshire.
He said: "It's a really exciting find. As hill forts are ancient monuments it is difficult to get permission off English Heritage to excavate.
"We were allowed to dig and found so many items, dating back thousands of years, but the body was such a great thing to unearth.
"It looks like the fort was destroyed, possibly in a battle, and the body thrown down a trench and covered in rocks."
The three-week dig involved more than 50 members of Longstone Local History Group, as well as school children from nearby Longstone Primary School.
Ann Hall, from the history group, said: "Two of our members were in the trench when one looked down and saw what he thought was bone.
"They called Clive over and he said it was definitely a human skull.
"The dig then changed and became a very delicate operation and Clive spent around three hours getting the pieces of bone out."
Dr Waddington said the body was at an irregular angle, with arms and legs facing in different directions.
Also found at the site was flint-like chert stone, which would have been used to make weapons such as arrow heads, and "scrapers" to clean animal skins so they could be made into tents and clothing.
He said: "The evidence we have gathered from the dig has been invaluable.
"For example, we think the fort is from the Iron Age, which ran from 700BC to 60AD, but from the hundreds of other more primitive tools we unearthed, we now know that part of Monsal Head was a quarry before then.
"The fort itself covers an area of around 10 acres which means it could have housed an entire town of 1,000 people or more.
"Hopefully radiocarbon tests on the body will bring more results, but the entire site has so much potential to inform us about the past than we originally thought."
Results of the post-excavation analysis will be presented at Derbyshire Archaeology Day, which will be held at the Pomegranate Theatre, in Chesterfield, on January 16 next year.
Comment on this story