A arrowhead from your mother’s jaw? A carving tool from Dad’s femur? Iron Age people made no bones about making tools from their ancestors’ bones, finds research in a new Scottish study on Iron Age people. The new research also showed how bones and funerals connected people living in communities.
The discovery was made after a team of researchers examined the rare, well-preserved remains of two individuals discovered at Loch Borralie in Sutherland, near the north-west tip of the Scottish mainland.
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Identifying funerary practices in Iron Age Britain c. 800 BC–AD 43 is notoriously difficult, the researchers say, because human remains rarely survive. However, the unique environmental conditions of north-west Scotland support the preservation of bone, allowing scientists to take a rare glimpse into the prehistoric past.
The two individuals – an adult female and a juvenile male – were found buried together in a low stone cairn. When experts conducted an osteological examination of the bones, they discovered evidence of postmortem skeletal modification.
Dr Laura Castells Navarro, from the University of York’s Department of Archaeology, said: “To find bodies of this age so well preserved is rare, but to discover evidence of a funeral ritual we previously knew nothing about was such a surprise, and very exciting.
“The adult female displayed incisions on the inside of her cranium, suggesting her brain had been intentionally removed after death. We have no other comparison of this type of practice, but we know that the dead were curated and treated carefully in Iron Age Britain, so our understanding is that this bone modification is within that same tradition of care,” she added.
Bones, including both humeri, ulna, and femur, had also been carefully tapered toward the ends into sharp points, suggesting they may have had use as tools before being carefully buried, the researchers said.
The results, published in the journal Antiquity, revealed that the two individuals were closely related, most likely second cousins. Isotope analysis showed that both had grown up around 50 miles south-east of where they were buried at Loch Borralie.
“The motivation behind the extensive manipulation of the skeletal remains is very difficult to interpret, but the care with which she was reassembled and deposited in the cairn possibly suggests she commanded a level of reverence and respect by her community,” said Castells Navarro.
The genetic data revealed family connections stretching much further across the sea: to the Orkney Islands, roughly 108 miles to the north-east, and to Applecross, about 140 miles to the south-west. Researchers argue that this web of DNA proves that family groups in prehistoric Britain were highly mobile and interconnected by water.
Dr Castells Navarro noted: “I think we can assume that the Iron Age dead were not forgotten, and still had meaning to the living, with a continued interaction between the living and the dead across time and distance.”
Whether the shaped bones were used, is anyone’s guess, but they were altered suggesting an unusual funeral rite or right of passage.
