Pearson, Mike Parker;
(2023)
Living with the dead: mummification and post-mortem treatment in Bronze Age Britain.
Archaeology International
, 26
(1)
pp. 145-166.
10.14324/ai.26.1.10.
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Abstract
A long-recognised problem in British prehistory is the replacement of formal cemeteries and burials from 1600 bce onwards by deposits with disarticulated human remains, many of them found on settlements. At the Bronze Age settlement site of Cladh Hallan in the Outer Hebrides the human remains include cremation deposits, inhumations, disarticulated bones and body parts of formerly mummified remains recombined as composite skeletons. These mortuary practices, including exhumation, curation and reburial, reveal an intimate relationship between the living and the dead. The burial of mummies beneath house floors and the deposition of other human remains within Cladh Hallan’s roundhouses demonstrate how dwellings were places of spiritual and cosmological meaning as well as practical utility. While later Bronze Age mortuary practices generally provide little indication of the social inequalities apparent in other lines of evidence, the practice of mummification may have served as an indicator of social status.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Living with the dead: mummification and post-mortem treatment in Bronze Age Britain |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/ai.26.1.10 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/AI.26.1.10 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2023, Mike Parker Pearson. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC-BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited |
| Keywords: | Bronze Age, mummification, Britain, prehistory |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of S&HS > Institute of Archaeology > Institute of Archaeology Gordon Square |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10187452 |
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