Before Burial: When Bronze Age Homes Were FULL of Human Bones

💬 When Barry Molloy’s team started digging up an ancient Bronze Age settlement - they never expected to uncover quite so many human bones. And they weren’t found in one place - they were everywhere.

Archaeologists uncovered over 100 fortified Late Bronze Age sites, and their findings tell us something unusual about the way we dealt with the dead throughout history. At this time in history - there really was no single way people would bury their dead. Sometimes bodies would be pulled apart, and a loved one’s bones would be brought into the home.

⚡In this episode we find out why ancient people collected the bones of their dead, what they might have been doing with them and whether these practices helped them deal with the grief of loss better.

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🎧 Stay tuned to learn about:

➡ How Barry found bones everywhere in a Bronze Age megafort in Europe 

➡ The many ways the dead were treated in history - from inhumation to excarnation

➡ Why some skulls seem to have been placed on pikes around borders to the site

➡ How the bones of family members may have been chewed by pets

➡ Why collecting bones could be about respecting and disrespecting the dead 

➡ How Bronze Age people would collect the bones of ancient heroes

Read Barry’s paper here:

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00934690.2026.2641968#abstract 

About the podcast:

What We Did Before is a podcast exploring the history of everyday life, from how we kept food fresh before fridges, to how we survived without shoes and what came before AI.

About your hosts:

Ollie Guillou is an award-winning podcast producer and broadcaster. He's co-founder of OG Podcasts, working with the likes of New Scientist, Dr Karan and Lessons From Our Mothers.

Connect with Ollie:

Website: www.ogpodcasts.co.uk 

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ollie-guillou 

Email: hello@ogpodcasts.co.uk

Image Credits:

Interfase, CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Jan Kameníček, CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0, via Wikimedia Commons