Fragments of the skull (left) and shoulder blades (right) of a woman buried at Loch Borralie, UK
Rebecca Ellis-Haken
A woman interred in Scotland 2000 years ago has peculiar scrape marks inside her skull, which suggest that removing the brain after death may have been a funeral tradition in Iron Age Britain.
The funerary practices in Iron Age Britain – which ran from about 800 BC until the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 – and the Iron Age more generally are mysterious because human remains from that long ago rarely survive.
We do know that some people from this time tended to be buried alongside their maternal kin, rather than spouses. Excavations of bones at the Suddern Farm and Danebury Iron Age sites in southern England indicate that bodies were sometimes exhumed after burial, and in one case a body was left exposed until the flesh was gone before the skeleton was reburied.
Laura Castells Navarro at the University of York, UK, and her colleagues have re-examined the remains of an adult woman and a teenage boy who were buried in a low stone cairn at Loch Borralie near the north coast of the Scottish mainland, originally excavated in 2000. Both died sometime between about 50 BC and AD 70.
Inside the cranium of the woman, the team found striations or scrape marks, which Castells Navarro says suggests her brain was intentionally removed.
“The scrapings look too regular and too straight to be made by any natural agent. It is most likely that some kind of sharp implement was used to do it,” she says.
“The evenness and the regularity of the marks is really interesting and does suggest manipulation,” says Adelle Bricking at Museum Wales in the UK, who wasn’t involved in the research. “And why not brain removal? If they’re intentionally mummifying people in other ways, then such evisceration is part of that.”
But Richard Madgwick at Cardiff University, UK, is less convinced. “The marks certainly suggest some manipulation of the cranium, but whether we can link them to the brain removal, I don’t know,” he says.
Castells Navarro and her colleagues also found that some of the woman’s long bones, including the femur, tapered towards the end as if they had been whittled to a point, perhaps to make them into tools.
“I think they got the long bones and broke them in half and then worked them to a taper. It’s beautifully smooth,” says Castells Navarro.
Madgwick, however, thinks that rather than the bones being worked and turned into tools, they might have simply been utilised because they had already broken in a certain way, just as some animal bones were used to make holes in leather, and the use gradually changed their shape. “But there must have been symbolism attached to the fact that it was human,” he says.
Whatever the reason for these bone modifications, the woman’s body was reassembled and placed in the cairn. “The fact that they put it back in the ground in anatomical order after the bones have been used, I find remarkable, and it perhaps hints that the identity of that individual was not entirely lost,” says Madgwick.
The discoveries fit a wider pattern seen elsewhere in Britain and mainland Europe of post-mortem modification of bones, says Andrew Lamb at the University of Edinburgh, UK. “I don’t know of any other cases of the brain being removed, but in southern France and Bulgaria you do have the tradition of rondelles, where sections of the bone are cut out post-mortem and these are then turned into amulets.”
Castells Navarro says the work sheds light on the continued relationship and interaction between the living and the dead during the Iron Age.
Bricking suggests part of the grieving process may have required the ceremonial breaking-up of a person to release their spirit or taking a piece of them with you. “Death isn’t the end, where they just bury people and leave them alone,” she says. “They’re exhuming them, selecting certain remains, working them, handling them and then finally placing them in a special place as their appropriate next step in their afterlife.”
The team also assessed DNA samples from the two individuals and compared them against existing data. This revealed that they were probably maternal second cousins. They were also related to Iron Age individuals from Orkney, about 175 kilometres to the north-east, and Applecross, some 225 kilometres to the south-west.
This matches archaeological finds of pottery that suggest a prehistoric maritime community in the Iron Age across Shetland, Orkney and the Western Isles of Scotland, says Lamb.
He says these people probably used wooden-framed boats with animal hide stretched over them, something like an Irish currach or coracle: “Fit for rugged seafaring, but not the biggest of vessels.”
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