Mummies of Bronze Age Scotland

Mummies, that rarified form of ancestor worship, have been found in a Bronze Age site in Scotland. In the September 2005 issue of the journal Antiquity, researchers describe how using techniques established by forensic anthropology to study the breakdown and fossilization of bone, they found evidence of mummification far from the previously known cultures which practiced it in Egypt and South America.

Mummies and Ancestor Worship

Ancestor worship is almost certainly one of the oldest religions of human beings. Mummification—the elaborate preparations used to preserve human tissue long after death—has been until recently thought to be a relatively rare, exotic practice, confined to dynastic Egypt and several South American societies such as the Chinchorro and Inca civilizations. Investigations at a community of Bronze age stone-walled round houses, enhanced by the study of bone diagenesis, suggest to an international team led by Mike Parker Pearson that mummification may be far more common than has been recognized in the past. Their report, titled Evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain, was published in the September 2005 issue of Antiquity.

The mummification process, as defined by archaeologists, is any purposeful technique that alters, slows, or stops the natural processes of decay of a human or animal body. Generally these are intended to preserve the soft tissues, including skin, ligaments and muscle. After death, the natural processes of decay work on the soft tissues and bones, breaking them down chemically and mechanically. Mummification attempts to stop or slow down these processes. Methods used by various cultural groups in the past to preserve human bodies after death included the removal of internal organs followed by wind-drying, heat-drying, tanning, or pickling. The reasons people mummified one another would have been varied, but are usually considered part of an ancestor worship ritual, practicing protection and care for one’s relatives after they are gone.

Cladh Hallan, Scotland

The site of Cladh Hallan is located on the island of South Uist, in the Outer Hebrides of western Scotland. The settlement consists of at least four residential structures called roundhouses, built during the Late Bronze Age and used through the Iron Age (1100-200 BC). Roundhouses are in small groups often sharing walls and with typically subterranean floors. The floors of Cladh Hallan extend about a meter below the current surface. Immediately beneath the floors of the Cladh Hallan roundhouses were found several human and dog burials, interpreted by Parker Pearson and company as representing pre-construction ritual offerings, a not uncommon characteristic of Bronze Age roundhouses.

Visual Suggestions of Mummification

Evidence for special post-mortem preparation of these subfloor interments was first suggested to the researchers by the method in which the burials were laid out. Some of the burials were in a tightly flexed position, indicating that the bones had been bundled, tied or wrapped together at death. One adult woman had her incisors removed and placed in her hands after her death. One burial was assembled from parts of three different adult male individuals. Clearly some complicated handling of the bodies had been completed prior to these burials. The possibility that the bones had been held together by soft tissue long after burial and above ground in the temperate climate of South Uist—only possible if the bodies had been chemically treated in one way or another—began to emerge.

Some conventional archaeological testing supported the hypothesis of mummification. Researchers ran conventional radiocarbon and optically stimulated luminescence dating techniques on both the skeletal materials and the roundhouse construction. Parker Pearson and colleagues determined that at least one of the interments had died hundreds of years before being buried beneath the floor of the roundhouse—and yet, that body was still partially articulated, the body parts still in their appropriate places. Strontium, oxygen, and lead stable isotope analysis confirmed that all of the individuals had lived in the Outer Hebrides prior to their deaths. In other words, the burials were not imported from climates where natural mummification occurs.

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