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The first clues

A team of archaeologists, led by Dr Mike Parker Pearson of Sheffield University, has recently found the remains of what are believed to be two mummified Bronze Age bodies, buried under the floor of a prehistoric house at Cladh Hallan on the Hebridean Island of South Uist. The house in which the mummy skeletons were buried was part of a unique Bronze Age complex, which is as mysterious as the preserved corpses that were buried there.

The find is the first evidence of deliberate mummification carried out in ancient times ever found in Britain - and is without doubt one of the most important archaeological discoveries made in recent years.

No mummified body tissue had survived - so it was not immediately obvious to the excavators what they had found, when they first came across two skeletons at Cladh Hallan. They did, however, think the skeletons looked very unusual, being very highly flexed, like Peruvian mummies.

Several months of detailed scientific tests followed, including radio carbon dating of the bones and of other materials from the site. The first suggestion that the skeletons had actually come from mummified bodies arose when the radio carbon dates came back from the laboratory.

To the astonishment of the archaeologists, they saw that one individual (a male) had died in around 1,600 BC - but had been buried a full six centuries later, in around 1,000 BC. What is more, a second individual (a female) had died in around 1,300 BC - and had had to wait 300 years before being interred.

The archaeologists thought this strange. They had never encountered anything like it before. If the skeletons had been left unburied for 600 or 300 years they would have ended up as just a pile of bones. It seemed that perhaps in some way the sinews and skin had been deliberately preserved, to permanently hold the skeletons together. The researchers began to wonder whether they had come across Britain's first mummies.

Next came the second piece of startling evidence. If indeed the uncovered bones had once belonged to mummified bodies, then how had the mummification been carried out? Bearing in mind the technologies and resources available in Britain during the Bronze Age, there were three main options.

Interpreting the discovery

A reconstruction of a nocturnal burial ritual  © Firstly there was the possibility that the bodies had been smoked to preserve them. Certainly people of the Bronze Age had the technology for that procedure, and indeed the archaeologists discovered a smokery on the Clad Hallan site - but it dated from 1100 and 800 years, respectively, after the individuals had died.

Secondly, the bodies could have been wind-dried, and there is certainly prehistoric archaeological evidence that shows that people in some parts of Scotland's Western Isles did use wind-drying techniques to preserve meat (especially large sea birds), in ancient and in later times.

Thirdly, the South Uist bodies could have been preserved by being placed temporarily in a peat bog. It is known that prehistoric people knew the preservative properties of certain types of peat bog and that they used it, in later prehistory, in Scotland and Ireland to preserve butter and tallow. What's more, the bodies of sacrificial or ritual murder victims (mainly from the Iron Age) have been found preserved in peat bogs in Britain and in continental Europe. Whether their killers intended that their victims should be preserved for eternity, however, is not known.

It was this third option that was most easy to test for, using modern forensic techniques. When a body is placed in the right sort of peat bog, its skin and sinews are tanned in much the same way that animal skin is turned into leather. The bone is also altered, and it becomes demineralised. The longer it is kept in the peat bog, the deeper into the bone the demineralisation process penetrates. If a peat bog had been used simply to preserve an individual sufficiently to keep the skeleton permanently in place (ie to preserve the person's skin and sinews), then the body would only have needed to stay in the bog for between 6 and 18 months, and that would have resulted in the demineralisation of only the outer few millimetres of bone.

Extraordinarily, that is precisely what the forensic tests showed had occurred. The scientific analysis revealed that just the outer 2mm of the bone had been demineralised.

Final part of the puzzle

A mummy's remains dating from the Bronze Age  © Lastly, subsequent forensic tests revealed a third and final piece of evidence for mummification.

The technique used to reveal this is based on the fact that, after death, the bacteria in the gut start devouring the body and attacking the skeleton. The bacterial onslaught changes the bone by riddling it with tiny holes. The degree of bacterial damage can then be tested to a high degree of accuracy by a forensic procedure known to scientists as mercury porosimetry.

A piece of bone, the volume of which has been very accurately measured, is placed inside a container of known volume. Mercury is then forced into the container under pressure. Some of the mercury enters the tiny holes made by the bacteria - and the scientists can then measure how much mercury has penetrated into the bone and therefore how much bacterial attack took place. In the case of the two South Uist skeletons, the test revealed a very low level of bacterial attack - a level consistent with the body being placed in a peat bog a day or two after death.

The test suggested very strongly that the corpses had not been allowed to decompose for long. It indicated that the process of decomposition had been halted at an early stage - presumably when the body was placed in the peat bog, or perhaps if it had been eviscerated prior to immersion in the bog.

Reasons for mummification

A Peruvian male mummy wearing a textile headband  © The archaeologists have now virtually proved that the two South Uist skeletons came from mummified bodies - and that they had remained unburied for 600 and 300 years respectively. But why their contemporaries wanted to mummify them is a complete mystery.

Motives for body preservation vary from place to place and period to period around the world. In ancient Egypt, people were mummified in order to help them attain eternal life. In ancient Peru, the Inca emperors were mummified so that they could continue to play their part in society. Indeed their mummified corpses even attended special state banquets.

In the Amazon jungle some tribes 'mummified' the heads of their enemies and kept them in their own homes - where their identity and spiritual strength could be expropriated by the kin of those who had killed them. In Tibet and Japan holy men were mummified, while in various other areas revered ancestors were preserved for posterity - and no doubt consulted on important tribal matters.

In prehistoric Britain there was a tradition of reverence towards ancestors, so it is conceivable that the South Uist mummies were important ancestral figures. As such, the tribe or clan may have seen them as having had protective powers or even the ability to intervene with the gods or cosmic spirits on behalf of their people.

It is probable that the preserved bodies were kept over the centuries in some sort of mummy house - a special dwelling to accommodate ancestors, probably both male and female. But in a sense the role the mummies performed is only part of the conundrum of Cladh Hallan.

Rituals at Cladh Hallan

How the village may have looked at the time of the Bronze Age  © The complex was made up of seven houses arranged as a terrace. The archaeologists have so far excavated three of them - and the dig has revealed that the structures were used not just as dwellings but also as places of ritual activity.

When the complex was constructed in around 1,000 BC, the two by then rather ancient mummies, along with the body of an entire sheep (possibly a sacrifice), were buried under the floor of the most northerly house. At around the same time an unmummified 13-year-old girl who had recently died was buried under the floor of the middle house. Underneath the southernmost of the three excavated structures, a three month old child was also interred around 1,000 BC. Also round 1,000, in the northernmost structure, a ritual was carried out in which large quantities of pottery were deliberately smashed.

A few years or decades later the cremated bones of some children were interred in the northern house (the one with the mummies under the floor). Then a couple of decades later still, more cremated children's bones were deposited in the house, along with several deliberately smashed pots and three smashed quern stones.

A group of unfired smashed pots was then stacked up against the inside of the house wall and subsequently the entire house was moved one metre east and rebuilt, with a bronze bracelet being deposited, probably to mark the occasion. At around the same time the southern house was dismantled.

Over the next few hundred years rituals continued in the northern and middle structures. In around 900 BC, for instance, a baby was buried in the north house and the building was again moved and rebuilt - this time two metres further west.

Life and death in prehistoric Britain

Remains reveal traces of ancient rituals at Cladh Hallan  © Over the years, in the two remaining houses, more pottery was deliberately smashed, and antlers, pots and bone tools were buried. More animals were also sacrificed - a sheep and two dogs. After several more deconstruction and reconstruction episodes, the north house was finally abandoned in around 700 BC - but the middle structure continued in ritual use until around 400 BC, making it the longest used house known from British prehistory.

The range of ritual activity in the complex is among the broadest known. It raises the question of whether the site was primarily a domestic/residential one or primarily a ritual and religious one. Who were the people that lived there? Were they ordinary Bronze Age tribes-people - or were they members of some ritual elite, potentially priests or shamans? And were the people who lived in the complex part of the same ethnic/ tribal group whose ancestors had been preserved and been venerated over the centuries? Or were they new arrivals or settlers, who had displaced the original 'mummy-venerating' population and had expropriated not only their land but their ancestors as well?

Only future archaeological investigations will stand a chance of answering these tantalising questions. But, for the time being, the discovery of Britain's first mummies should start to redefine key aspects of life and death in prehistoric Britain.

Find out more

Books

Beyond Death by B Arriaza (Washington, 1995)

The Mummies of Urumchi by EW Barber (London, 1999)

The Bog Man and the Archaeology of People by D Brothwell (London, 1986)

Mummies, Disease and Ancient Cultures by A Cockburn et al. (eds.) (Cambridge, 1998)

The Bog People by PV Glob (London, 1975)

About the author

David Keys is an archaeological journalist; he has been the archaeology correspondent of the London daily newspaper The Independent, writes for other major papers and magazines worldwide and is the author of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of the Modern World. He has visited well over 1,000 archaeological sites in more than 60 countries. As both a programme originator and as a presenter, he has helped bring more than 20 archaeological documentaries and other programmes to British and American TV screens.