Experts think there is proof that Bronze Age Britons mummified their corpses in a secluded cave on Scotland's northern shore.
The Covesea Caves range - an almost inaccessible series of caves along Scotland's northern coast (Image: Society of Antiquaries of Scotland)
Archaeologists discovered human bones scattered across the floor of the Covesea Caves range, a nearly inaccessible system of caves close to Inverness, when they began their excavations there. The fact that the bones in the hands still had soft tissue in them and that the remains were "remarkably well preserved" astounded them.
When excavating a site that is 3,000 years old, it's not something we anticipate, according to Dr. Lindsey Büster of the University of Edinburgh. That's a highly important discovery. There is no way to know for sure, but the bone might have once been a component of a fully fleshed corpse.
The investigators also discovered signs that fires had been ignited inside the caves, probably as the bodies were being spread out and preserved by smoke. Dr. Büster thinks this would indicate that people went to the location especially to mummify the remains of their friends and family members.
Archaeologists arriving at the mouth of the cave ( Image: Smithsonian Channel)
She went on to say, "I think once bodies began to be brought into the cave and were behaving in ways they didn't normally do on above-ground sites, those characteristics were probably well noted and became a factory of people coming back again and again over centuries to deposit their dead."
For Bronze Age Britons, who would have routinely made the trip some 3,000 years ago while carrying the bodies of their deceased, the voyage to the caves would have been dangerous. Dr. Büster continued, "For prehistoric people to make the effort and to make the journey would've been really arduous and quite a difficult thing to do."
She asserts that they behaved in this way because "something about this place gave it mystical, perhaps even magical properties." The information was discovered during filming the Smithsonian Channel series "Mystic Britain: Mummies" in 2020.
The first study to demonstrate that Bronze Age communities in all of Britain were purposefully attempting to preserve tissue on dead bodies was completed in 2015. Microscopic decomposition of skeletons from UK locations mirrored that in bones from other places of the world known to have been mummified, according to Dr. Tom Booth of Sheffield University.
The bone may have once been part of an entire fully fleshed corpse, but there's no way to know for certain ( Image: Smithsonian Channel)
Dr. Booth studied bone degeneration caused by bacteria using precise micro-analysis in collaboration with researchers from the Universities of Manchester and London. At the time, he stated: "Our research indicates that deliberate burial in a peat bog and smoking over a fire are two methods that ancient Britons may have employed to mummify their dead.
Other methods might have included organ removal soon after death through evisceration. The bones of the remains matched those of a partially mummified body found in a peat bog in County Roscommon, Ireland, and a mummified sample from northern Yemen.
Dr Lindsey Büster said it's a "really significant find" ( Image: Smithsonian Channel)
"When a person passes away, their gut bacteria spreads out around their body and begins to decompose tissue," continued Dr. Booth. However, if a body is mummified—which can refer to any method of consciously preserving flesh—that stops. Finding a reliable way to recognize mummified skeletons is a challenge for archaeologists, especially when they come across skeletons buried outside of a secure setting.
"To help with this, our team has discovered that by using microscopic bone analysis archaeologists can determine whether a skeleton has previously been mummified even when it is buried in an environment that isn't conducive to mummified remains," the researchers write. However, history fans wanting to find Egyptian-style mummies wrapped in miles of white cloth in Britain will be dissatisfied. "There is evidence that people in the Bronze Age were wrapping bodies up to a certain extent, but it was not quite as elaborate as the Ancient Egyptians," Dr. Booth said.
