There is a message so wrong in this starting statement that one should sack the journalist. It concerns the discovery of a Roman elite skeleton: female, of mixed race origin, living in York.
Archaeologists have discovered that wealthy black Africans lived in Roman Britain in one of the country’s earliest examples of multiculturalism.
It was one of the country's earliest examples of imperialism. A small, impoverished territory was invaded by the continental great power and subjugated. Their culture was imported by violence and enforced on the backs of the local population. Some of the invaders happened to be black:
Her sarcophagus, which was made of stone, a sign of immense wealth in Roman Britain, was discovered in 1901 in Bootham, York. The city was then a legionary fortress and civilian settlement called Eboracum, founded by the Romans in AD71....
Hella Eckardt, who carried out the study, said: “Multicultural Britain is not just a phenomenon of more modern times.
She added that inscriptions from that period showed that African people were most often members of the imperialist power’s army. But the latest research on a series of skeletons showed that African men had immigrated to Britain, invariably with the Roman Army, and had brought their wives and children.
Another good example of how ideological leavings of the present can distort our view of the past and the Roman Empire. Better to have a multicultural and multiracial society enforced by violence than leave the British to their own devices. And if they belonged to the Roman Army, they were likely to be of one culture: Roman.