BBC Has A Religion Problem

I caught a story about an archaeological dig and I think the BBC has a religion problem.

The story:

The body of a girl thought to have been murdered by Roman soldiers has been discovered in north Kent.

Archaeologists working on the site of a Roman settlement near the A2 uncovered the girl who died almost 2,000 years ago.  "She was killed by a Roman sword stabbing her in the back of the head," said Dr Paul Wilkinson, director of the excavation.  By the position of the entry wound she would have been kneeling at the time."

The Roman conquest of Britain began in AD43, and the construction of Watling Street started soon afterwards linking Canterbury to St Albans. A small Roman town was built on the route, near present-day Faversham.

[Dr Paul Wilkinson Director of excavation]...believes the body had then been dumped in what looked like a hastily dug grave. She was lying face down and her body was twisted with one arm underneath her body. One of her feet was even left outside the grave," he said...the body was found with some fragments of iron age pottery which would date the grave to about AD50, and suggest that she was part of the indigenous population.

 So far, it reads quite solid and plausible.  But then, I got mnixed up, or someone else did:

Another indication of her origin, according to Dr Wilkinson, is the orientation of the body. Romans buried their bodies lying east-west, whereas this body was buried north-south, as was the custom for pagan graves.

Am I mistaken, or weren't the Romans pagans as well?

If so, there must be another reason for the differences in directions.

Jews are buried with the feet pointing towards Jerusalem. (and read para. 11 here)

So why did the pagan Romans follow that custom but the pagans of England did not?

Worse, if the date of burial was around 50 AD, there's another problem from here:-

Even into the 1st century A.D., the practice of cremation was the norm and burial and embalming were referred to as a foreign custom. By the time of Hadrian, this had changed and by the 4th century, Macrobius refers to cremation as a thing of the past, at least in Rome. The provinces were a different matter...Whether or not it was in connection with Christianity, cremation gave way to burial during the (www.ostia-antica.org/~isolsacr/burial.htm) reign of Hadrian in the Imperial period.

And then there is this:

The direction of burial is a great starting point. If all graves in a particular area are found with the head pointing in the same direction we would be confident in saying that there is a tradition at play here. Unfortunately, the current evidence for a tradition of grave orientation really doesn't come in to play until the late Roman period, and even then, it is not in any way a global phenomenon.

So, who was that editor at the BBC responsible for the story?

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