NORTH YORKSHIRE, U.K.- The latest character to be unearthed in an archaeological dig is a transvestite priest who has castrated himself in a painful religious rite. Dripping with jewelry and almost certainly buried in women’s clothes and an elaborate hairdo, the emergence is the most colorful fragment of a 40-year jigsaw at Catterick, North Yorkshire, which is giving historians unprecedented insight into small Romano-British towns. Triggered by the decision to drive a bypass through the middle of vanished Cataractonium, an important link between London and Hadrian’s wall, the dig continued over three square miles until five years ago. Its huge haul of finds, including elaborate wall paintings and a Roman motel used by officials in a hurry, has now been analyzed and catalogued for the first time. The wealth of the town is also indicated by the number and complexity of excavated locks. The effeminate priest was buried with two symbolic pebbles in his mouth in case his cult of Cybele proved erroneous and he needed his virility back in the next life. His presence in Catterick reinforces the theory that mystic eastern religions were popular in 4th century Roman Britain; an altar to Cybele was found early in the last century at Corbridge, near the wall, and a castration clamp, now in the British Museum, was fished out of the Thames. The cult was usually dominant wherever it was accepted, partly because of its noisy rituals, which the poet Ovid described as involving "loud howls". Devotees modelled themselves on the goddess’s lover Attis, who made himself a eunuch in remorse after an extramarital affair. The priest, known in Latin as a gallus, was found wearing necklaces and bracelets made of the semi-precious mineral jet, a shale armlet and an expanding anklet made of bronze.