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

SPEAKER_00 0:00 Imagine returning home to your village after a busy day to be greeted by human skulls on pikes. You head home to see the femur of your great aunt lying on the floor and the skull of your grandma proudly displayed on your mantelpiece. It might sound macabre, but for some Bronze Age communities, this might have been a reality. You see, before burying our dead in the ground became the norm, our ancient ancestors had many different ways of dealing with the deceased. And quite often, they'd simply rip a dead body apart. I always think if I lived in pre-history, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew it was happening, you know. That's Barry Malloy, an archaeologist who has just uncovered the most unexpected surprise at a Bronze Age site in Central Europe. Every time we were sticking a spade in the ground under settlements, we just kept finding human remains. I'm Oli Giu, and this is What We Did Before, where we explore the history of everyday life. And today, Barry is here to discuss his incredible findings and what we did before burial. Barry Malloy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me. Thank you very much for the invitation to join. Well, I was so fascinated when I saw your recent discovery, uh your recent work looking at what are quite surprising burial practices of ancient people, or if you can call them burial practices at all, um because they weren't exactly burying their dead. In fact, your paper is titled The Unburied Dead. Um, can you tell me about the research that you've been doing?

SPEAKER_01 1:32 Yeah, I could give you a little bit of background, I suppose, first. Uh we're looking at the Bronze Age in the Carpathian Basin, so that's in Central Europe. Well, Central to Southeast Europe, and we're looking at a period, roughly speaking, from 1500 to 1200 BC. That's called the Late Bronze Age, and it's a period where people might be familiar with things like uh in New Kingdom Egypt, Tutankhamun, the Trojan War, that kind of thing. So just to broadly locate you in time and space, we were interested really in what's happening in this really central part of Europe. It's a very well connected area, so what happens there is important, but earlier in the Bronze Age, we had these Tel settlements, this big, big uh complex, I suppose, uh society in the area, and it had collapsed sometime around 1600, 1500 BC, and we were interested in, well, what's happening next in this area at this time of all these other societies coming to their height, and it's a really big globalized Bronze Age world. So we went uh investigating the settlements of the area and we found these huge fortified sites, and that was something quite unexpected. We didn't realise to find this like over a hundred of these massive fortified sites, and that includes one that was known previously, which is called Karneshti Yorkuri, the biggest bronze the biggest prehistoric site in Europe, I think. Uh it's massive, massive fortified site. When you say fortified, how were they fortifying it? Er, they were building ditches around the sites, often quite large ditches, they might be five, six metres across, they could be two, three, even four meters deep, and some of them then would have had walls like palisades, so wooden wooden and earthen walls going around the inside. So they were they were quite keen on keeping what they had inside and keeping people on to take it on the outside.

SPEAKER_00 3:11 Is it is this surprising because we didn't necessarily know they were doing this wide scale in the Bron Bronze Age, that it this sort of complex um architecture almost.

SPEAKER_01 3:22 Yeah, I mean that that that was a surprise for us because uh we we had known of Korneshdi Arkuri, this massive site, and there's one or two others known. So these are kind of seen as these isolated phenomena. But then our our our research, uh looking at aerial imagery, then going down onto the ground, driving around, finding these sites on the ground, we like I say, we discovered over a hundred of these sites over the course of maybe uh three or four years. So it went from knowing of one or two isolated sites to seeing this as a a whole complex of these sites covering this whole landscape.

SPEAKER_00 3:51 And so you were there looking at these incredible um fortifications. Did you expect to find what you did in terms of the sort of ancient burial practices?

SPEAKER_01 4:03 Well, that that was the thing. Like we we were we were interested in learning about the lives of the people that lived in these sites. So we were looking at the mortuary archaeology, but then when we were digging these settlements, we just kept finding human remains. So we're digging the ditches we find human remains, we dig pits we find human remains, uh, even when the a slightly later period, going to about you know, 900 BC, 800 BC, we're finding humans in uh complete burials, bits of burials in the remains of houses. So every time we were sticking a spade in the ground on the settlements, we were finding them. So, you know, the cemeteries, so we thought that's where they're putting the dead, but no.

SPEAKER_00 4:39 They're doing a lot more of the dead than we expected. Kind of an archaeologist dream in a way to find something wherever you put your spade.

SPEAKER_01 4:47 Yeah, yeah. But it was, I mean, we've only dug like uh what the sites we're digging, we might have dug 0.01% of the site, and literally every single trench we're finding human remains. So often in small quantities, but it's when we look at the size of these sites and the tiny bit we dug, the fact that there's everywhere we go we find it means these are widespread throughout the settlement.

SPEAKER_00 5:08 What um condition are these human remains in when you do find them? They can be quite varied.

SPEAKER_01 5:14 Uh we often find small fragments of them, and they were broken up before being put in the ground, and we also find sometimes complete things like we find occasionally complete skulls or large portions of complete skulls, we find complete arm and leg bones, these kind of things in the ditches. In our surrounding area, we do sometimes find complete burials. There's some in Hungary where they suspect people were bound and buried in the pit. We don't know if they were tied and killed and put in or buried alive, we don't really know, but we're finding, you know, just uh complete remains, disturbed remains, and bits of remains on these settlements.

SPEAKER_00 5:50 And so the fact that they were scattered and not all in one place, as you suggest, means that they weren't being buried in one particular space like we would today, like we would expect. So what was happening then? Why were they kind of littered about the place?

SPEAKER_01 6:08 Er well it seems even then there was a couple of different reasons, and I can say it's not as clear as we'd like it to be, uh, but what we did is a new method of histotathomy, which is um my colleague Tom Booth over uh in the Crick Institute in London. Uh he uses CT scans of bones, and from that he's able to say, was this bone exposed to the air for a long time before it was buried, or was this bone attached to a person or otherwise, buried, buried in the ground very soon after death? And we are finding examples of bones that had been exposed uh straight after death, they're exposed for a period of time to the elements. And that uh leads into this burial practice we call excarnation, where people are exposed and their bodies are allowed to decompose in the air. Presumably on a platform or something, we don't get like animal naw we don't get rodent gnaw marks like rats or mice or anything climbing aboard to start chewing at the at the flesh. So they're in a protected space, but their bodies were decomposing, it seems. Others seem to have been physically broken apart while still fresh. No, that's quite gooey and maybe in our view at least, not not how we normally expect the treatment of the dead to take place. But we had uh like one example where the the cranial vault had been cracked open with something like an axe. So we don't know if that was breaking the head apart uh to break it or were they actually trying to access the brain.

SPEAKER_00 7:28 But a net effect as they were getting inside the skull, and that was very soon after death. So accessing the brain, we know that um at least in sort of ancient Egypt, um a lot of people thought the heart was the sort of control center of the body and not the brain. The brain was seen actually more as sort of a kind of useless organ in many ways. Um it's only in in fairly recent times that we've had that perspective shifted. So is it possible that they wanted the brain for something or that they were just trying to remove it so that they could make these skulls you know lighter and more decorative?

SPEAKER_01 8:04 I'm afraid with the fragments we get, we just can't tell that. We we don't have the complete body. All that we have remaining is that fracture that tiny small fragment of the skull that tells us that they had, you know, accessed uh they'd broken it and they'd accessed it. So, you know, we were between was it the brain that they're after, or was deconstructing the skull that they were looking to do? I know we've one other case where we've got uh again, this was not what you expect when you when you're excavating. We found the frontal bone of a person, so basically from around here back to middle of the head, just this top part of the skull, but it had a hole in it. And we you'd expect something that like this might be from an injury, they might have been shot with an arrow or a sling or something, but then we noticed that the hole was actually from the inside of the skull, not from the outside. So this had been somehow pierced with a a stake, something had gone probably probably when it was a complete skull, it had gone through the base of the skull, now it's through the top of the skull. And we looked at examples from around Europe, there weren't many parallels, but we had some from Sweden from a much earlier period, and they appeared to have been putting heads on spikes there. So it we can't tell that, but it has the physical characteristics that would be like, you know, someone had put this on a spike.

SPEAKER_00 9:15 Yeah, so either um putting a head on a spike of an enemy that you've sort of defeated, or doing it to sort of proudly display a deceased loved one is uh th those are two possibilities, right? They could be, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 9:29 And I mean the thing is we we find these in the ditches surrounding the sites, a lot of these remains. So you imagine these are large sites, they're this one where we found this is 200 hectares in size, um, and we find these at the boundaries. So that's kind of right if you're entering into the site, you have to pass through these boundaries. You go through a causeway like a little like a drawbridge, except it's built of earth. So you go through this causeway into the site, and that's where we're finding the human remains sometimes. So this instance of the head where it had been pierced, if that had been displayed, it was displayed as you're going into the site. So everybody coming in and leaving that would have seen it. So yeah, part and parcel of your experience of visiting these places.

SPEAKER_00 10:09 Wow, that's fascinating. Um I'm I'm sort of sort of building up this mental image of it now. Um it kind of looks quite gothic in a way. Um tell me a little bit about a bit more about excarnation, because um this seems like a strange practice to leave the body exposed to uh uh uh to the air to decompose like that outside of a grave. Why would that have been uh a pr a practice by ancient people? Uh that's a yeah, it's a it's a challenging question.

SPEAKER_01 10:40 I mean, we we we don't have enough dead people in cemeteries. So you you have this question in archaeology of what are they doing with the dead? You know, if we've cemeteries with a couple of tens of people spread over two, three hundred years, that's not the living population. So the other people were going somewhere else, something was happening with them. But at this time we have cremation as a burial practice. And cremation in this period, they weren't taking what they they will I'm sure your uh viewers all know what cremation is, but basically at this time they put them on a wooden pyre and they'd burned this for several hours, it would burn down, and then you've got the charred remains of the person there. The you know the fragments tend to be quite large, you know, you can pick them up and see them. It's not like the uh modern day cremation when you get the ashes back. This is kind of burned bone. Uh but they only went and retrieved some of these bones and uh put them into the urn. So it's kind of token a token element of a person was often seen to be enough to represent the person, but it also means that the other bits of that person went somewhere else. They were left at the site, they're put in a river. But the ultimate thing is that bodies were broken apart in death and they were separated, so they weren't treated as an integral human being, they didn't need every bit of you to represent you, so that fragmentation seems to then translate across into the bodies that weren't burned, so excarnation, the body's going to basically decompose into its parts, and they can be dealt with separately then from decomposition rather than fire.

SPEAKER_00 12:06 Do you think that's potentially because we well, we we hadn't developed formal religion by this point, and so the body was seen more um practically than spiritually, like it is today?

SPEAKER_01 12:20 Um I I I think that we have this sense of the body and the individual, and my my colleague Joe Brooke in in Dublin has done a lot of work on this, but this idea of that we see that when a person dies, that their body goes into the ground, and we remember that individual. That might be our like I can go to a cemetery and find a gravestone that has my great-great-grandfather's name or great-great-grandmother's name on it, and I can you know think back to that as an individual, but uh Joe's work was suggesting that you know once you go one or two generations down the line, you've got this more generic ancestors. So um their their belief was that you join the ancestors perhaps when you die. Now, the extent to what that's part of a religious practice or religious beliefs, we don't know, but there's more of this kind of generalized sense of ancestors, um and we think that that's part of what's happening with the human remains, that um when they're buried, they can be broken apart. And the you know, if you're using a part of this, it's not necessarily my great-great-grandmother, it can be an ancestor from this family lineage or from our community that I'm actually accessing.

SPEAKER_00 13:23 Just a quick one, if you're enjoying this and you like weird stories from human history like this, do hit subscribe. It helps the channel out massively. Right. Back to Barry. So it sounds like um there was no typical way of burying or dealing with the dead in ancient times. It doesn't seem to be a practice that was more common than others, would you agree? I would.

SPEAKER_01 13:46 I always think if I lived in pre-history, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew it was happening, you know, you you would die and your body might be buried, it might be cremated. We're just seeing such a myriad ways of how the bodies were treated after death, and it's our biggest challenge is a lot of these don't leave archaeological traces. You know, we're so lucky to have accessed uh the material to have understood that this was excarnation because we found these few bones, and using this uh CT scanning method we're able to define, yeah, excarnation is what explains this, but that's a rarity, and it's only recent years we've had that technology that can translate a little bit of a bone to telling us about the mortuary practices and how the body was dealt with before it was buried.

SPEAKER_00 14:26 And so can we speculate a little bit about what these bones would have been used for like day-to-day or like in in the home, for instance? Like, why would they have been retrieving and collecting these bones other than just to represent the ancestors?

SPEAKER_01 14:42 My my suspicion is they're doing it for a variety of reasons. Um I mean, just even down to disrespecting the dead. Like, you know, this could be the bond we we often think of this in terms of the ancestors, you're getting the the you're taking retrieving the body of someone you care about. They can also be disturbing the graves of enemies, of enemy groups, it can be a very disrespectful treatment. So we can imagine when they're they're retrieving bones from burials, and they're also they're retrieving bones from excarnations, they might be also physically breaking bodies apart. So there's a lot of different pathways to how the body would have bits of the body would have ended up in community. And we've no idea if that was all one thing. Like there might have been we've one cite Vatin, where you had a bunch of skulls just outside of a house. So you might imagine in that context, these skulls possibly had been in the house for a period, and they might have been experienced, but then they might have you know come to an end of that role, an end to that function, and then you know, they might have been treated not quite like garbage, but basically when that meaning got transformed, that they weren't needed anymore. So they're placed outside the house, and they these were found outside of a house in a rubbish tip. So again, we we it one reading is oh they didn't care about these people, that they're you know, they were disrespecting them by putting into a rubbish tip. But it could also be that they just the meaning had changed. They had served a purpose, they'd been there for however however many moons, whatever it might be, and after that they could be gotten rid of. We have other examples where we've human remains uh broken apart or complete crania placed into pits in the ground alongside uh animal bones that had been butchered. So again, is that disrespectful? Is it respectful? Are you putting somebody together with the remains of a feast, or are you treating the body as basically discard as rubbish? It you know, this part of the body we can put it in with these animal bones in a pit. It's hard to read, but when we bring it all together, we can see that there's clearly different pathways that human remains are experienced differently, sometimes respectful, sometimes not, on the same settlement.

SPEAKER_00 16:37 Yeah, I can I can imagine there being a huge amount of respect to the human body through this practice, because on the one hand, it is in the modern day, it sort of seems disrespectful if we would just start pulling apart a body and and putting, you know, the the armbone in one house and and you know their feet in in another, for instance. Um but in ancient times perhaps it was seen differently in that it was about keeping that person with you in some way rather than going to visit uh a grave. You've got a physical representation of them that is with you, that you get to hold on to. And then perhaps, you know, like when your parents die and you have the job of clearing out their house, for instance, um, so that you can sell it, that's what happens. The next generation, um, their parents die, and they say, Oh, they've they've hoarded so many human bones, we better discard them, and it's a process of elimination like that. But it starts, you can imagine it starts as this um way of respecting the dead and and keeping them close to you so that you don't I suppose so that you never feel so far away from death. Because I think actually in the modern day now, we do feel a little bit disconnected from death, and we've we've made that separation almost intentionally, and maybe it was a healthy way to be in ancient times. It was.

SPEAKER_01 17:55 We have this, as you say, this real division between death and uh and life, even in terms of the the the way we experience dead people, it's in a cemetery. It's in a very specific part, like we look at a modern city or even a village. The cemetery is a part of the town, so you've got your living area where you're walking around experiencing your your lived life, and if you want to engage with the dead, you go to this walled-off place, this secluded place, it's marked with very particular monuments, and you know you're in a cemetery when you're in a cemetery, and you know you're not when you're not. I know I know that might seem simple, but in these contexts that division wasn't there. That the place of the living, the place of the dead intersected, you dead people all around you. And I mean that can be the recent deceased, it can be like if you if you've experienced loss and you don't want to let that person go. I mean, we've intramural burials, people buried beneath houses, that kind of thing also happens, where the people are kept close. But also, I'm I'm thinking even of uh you've got in Iron Age Greece, you've got this these hero cults where they actually went around plundering Bronze Age graves. That was their age of heroes, and they they were looking for Odysseus and Agamemnon, these characters, and they're finding an ancient burial, they're taking a bone out of it, kind of almost like the medieval Christian tradition, they're coming back with these relics, saying, like, I am the bone of Achilles, and this is going to bring great fortune to our family. So that there's also that intergenerational gap that you got we have this kind of sense of uh, like I said earlier, we our great-great-grandparent means something to us. We have no idea in these societies, going back that many generations, you know, they're a common ancestor, they could be a hero, and bringing those relics from what they would have recognised as a previous time, it empowers those relics, it could be a good luck charm. So the human body is completely changed into material culture then. It's like, you know, the skull is a lucky charm. That that really seems weird to us, but in in these times they were a very, very different, I suppose, um, moral sense of what the human body meant in part or or in whole.

SPEAKER_00 19:48 A different sense of grave robbing back then, a more heroic than it might potentially be seen now. Um but and also I don't know whether it would have been um whether the fact that generations came more quickly back in those times because people didn't live as long, whether that would have mattered as well to people wanting to preserve the memory of people because they simply weren't around in their lives for as long.

SPEAKER_01 20:13 That's true as well, yeah. I mean it's it it's it's very hard archaeologically to archaeologically to get that uh that time span that the re the relics and remains of j of uh literally people you knew in your lifetime and you knew where they're buried. If you're retrieving those, it's the person you're retrieving. So having them close to you, having them within your settlement, i it can relate to that kind of um managing loss, managing the emotional experience of it.

SPEAKER_00 20:39 You obviously see um you know ancient dice, for instance, were often made of bone, not human bone, but made of bone. Could you imagine, given that their their presence in the home was so abundant, potentially these were being used as tools or some sort of uh you know cups, cutlery, you know, other more practical uses because you sort of simply needed to use everything that you could get your hands on uh in the Bronze Age?

SPEAKER_01 21:07 Well, we're looking at quite prosperous societies here, so I don't think there would have been a a needs must treatment to it, but I I think um I think human remains, while they were material culture, they were still treated as being um human in some sense. They didn't lose that human value, so that they didn't become kind of uh utilitarian parts of human culture. I know I know there's other examples from prehistory of you having using human skull fragments to make combs, things like this, but I again I think that's really, really uh that's transforming it, but it's retaining the human value. It's not just becoming a comb, it's becoming a comb made from a human skull fragment. Like in our case, we've got one uh settlement we excavated at Sakula where we had a human femur, and uh it was a part of it, and the re the reason we only had a part of it was that a dog had been chewing on this. So this was within a domestic space. It was a dog sitting down, happily chewing away on some relative or some ancestor, whatever it might have been, but it was a fairly recently dead person, so it would have been known to the people on the settlement, and yet the dog just sat there and chewed it, and it was discarded along with animal bones at at the same in the same domestic area.

SPEAKER_00 22:16 Yeah, uh it's quite unexpected, you could say. Deeper respect for recycling that they they had. Um and do we do we see that we've had sort of mortuary practices for pretty much all of history? You know, obviously there would have well, I'm assuming there would have been a time where we simply just left the dead where they lay, uh, especially if we were migrating. But for the span of at least Homo sapiens, have we got good evidence that we have been doing some sort of burial for dead ancestors, dead relatives?

SPEAKER_01 22:54 Er we do going back into the late Upper Palaeolithic, so going back into uh 12,000 BC, something like this, we we've from then onwards we've got consistent evidence of burial practices. But it's also important to remember that burial ritual, our mortuary ritual and burial aren't necessarily the same thing, that we kind of equate when you die that uh a physical space is created and your body's put into it and sealed and contained there. But just taking the example of excarnation, there's many other things, it could be like cave burials, there could be river burials, there's so many things that how you dispose of the body is perhaps less important than the rituals that might have taken place around it. And we find it hard archaeologically to detect you know it going back deeper in time, but that doesn't mean that people weren't treating their the human body uh in a ritual at death in a particular manner, because we have those examples from like um uh Sandidar Cave in Iraq of the uh Neanderthal burials. There's all also in um La Chapelle in France the Neanderthal burials. Uh we even have it in South Africa uh at Rising Star Cave, you've got the homonalidi, which is a it's pre-human but kind of not it's a it's a it's a hominid, so like us, but on a different evolutionary branch. It didn't kind of evolve into us. And they seem to have been bringing their dead into a cave. Whether they're burying them or not isn't clear. That's a bit of debate, or an area of quite a bit of debate at the moment. But the fact that they're bringing them into the cave, they're pulling them in through these narrow passages, that they were removing them from places where they would be eaten by predators. So they're treating the dead in a particular way. So I I think mortary practices and dealing with that death dealing with death as a transformational state, but still engaging with the body thereafter in some way, is something that is really a deep part of the human human lineage.

SPEAKER_00 25:48 Yeah, and on on the podcast recently we actually tackled this new research from Tinshmith Cave in Israel, where it suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have collaborated um in many respects on the evolution of their culture and their beliefs and potentially their burial practices as well. So it's it's possible you go back to Neanderthal burial that Homo sapiens were sort of learning from what they were doing.

SPEAKER_01 26:17 I mean, this is fully possible. I I'm reminded of a when I was an undergraduate uh in the last millennium, uh I was an undergraduate in the 1990s, um there was a lecture on Neanderthal society, shall we say. The the speaker at the end of the question was asked, you know, would humans and Neanderthals perhaps have uh you know coalesced through mating? And the response of the time was, well, would you copulate with a gorilla? Which it was said in jest, but basically at the time, the very idea of interbreeding between species, this is going back 30 years, that was outlandish. And then genetics came along and flipped that in its head, and then we see that they were interbreeding, and that means to a social and cultural interaction between them. So in terms of how beliefs evolved, I I don't know, there's complexity there, but in terms of maybe the Neanderthal's influencing and the Homo sapiens influencing, there was probably 10,000 years or more of these groups living in the same territories interacting with each other, and that's that's a long time. So I don't know, I must say I don't know the exact details of the site you're talking about, but it's not something these days that would surprise me to hear of this uh collaboration.

SPEAKER_00 27:25 And um, do we have signs of other you've talked about cave burials, river burials, are there any any other practices that humans have used throughout history that archaeology's been able to uncover, or uh and maybe any particularly surprising ones?

SPEAKER_01 27:40 Well, we seem to be infinitely creative with how we deal with the dead when we go when we go back. When you look in global perspective, I mean you've the as many people know, for example, you've got those uh the child burials that the the the Peruvian mummies, you have these child burials in the caves high in the Andes, where uh they were kind of uh tightly bound together and placed into caves. We have uh throughout northwestern Europe and quite a few examples in Ireland of these um bog bodies where I suppose burial might be glorified with what saying what happened to them because they were they were downright nasty what happened to these people. They were people brought to the bogs and they were killed in myriad different ways. Often yeah, one or two examples from Ireland where you can see the variety of treatments and they they didn't die well, but they were placed into the bog afterwards. So that's the use of the body is not how we consider burial. The body's been used uh in a ritual there, perhaps to mark a space, perhaps to transform to have a transformative effect on the landscape. We have ossueres, which is it's still something we find in the Orthodox religion in Greece, Orthodox Christianity. You're buried for a period of time, your body's retrieved, it's cleaned, and then in many cases it's placed into a communal pit, shall we say, or or a space where there is just loads of other human remains. So the body is dis dis dis uh disaggregated and put with others. And we have like really bizarre versions of that. You've got the sed uh church over in Czechia, where they've got the entire church inside is decorated with human remains. And it's I mean, they're just chandeliers made from human bones, there's the pillars are decorated with human bones, and again that's because it seems macabre, but that's because the church itself is built on a letter, or the story is it's built on soil brought back from the Holy Land, as as they have it in that religion, and uh so the church is there and everybody wanted to be in it, there wasn't enough space, so they did this with them. But yeah, I th I think it's down to for us the body is inseparable. When you die, we believe it should be treated together as as a holistic thing, but there's so many examples throughout the world where you have the body will be disaggregated and used in very creative and different ways.

SPEAKER_00 29:51 Is it possible that, especially given your recent research, bones could have been used as some form of currency? Uh or or would you see like markings which would uh determine that more clearly if it was the f was the case that these were used for trading or or some other form of currency like that?

SPEAKER_01 30:11 We we don't have anything that would necessarily say that they were used as currency, um, but again, the the there can be that sense of value in relics and value in specific things, because when you look at medieval times, uh sainty relics were actually traded. I mean, there are chips of the true cross. I mean, I'm sure there was enough chips of wood there to build a cathedral out of them, had the chips of the true cross circulating. But with human remains as well, like um we've got Saint Valentine in in Dublin here where I live, uh the relics of St. Valentine in a church. But that was commonplace then, and I mentioned earlier that you had in Greece searching for these elements of uh of the work of the heroes of the heroic age, the of the Bronze Age, and that these were these were often people were told by the Delphic Gargle, go find these. So, in that sense, bones could have value, but I think it's a culturally embedded value that it was a bone of someone or something, rather than the bone itself having value intrinsically because it is bone.

SPEAKER_00 31:10 How accurately could they have determined whether they really had unearthed um Achilles' heel, for instance, you know, a bone of an ancient hero? Obviously, even now we've got incredible ability to sort of, you know, map genetics and really, you know, this new research that you've been um doing as well, looking at how long it's been exposed to the elements. Um was a lot of it just story and legend in terms of what they unearthed and what they called it and what what a society was willing to believe uh that bone who that bone belonged to?

SPEAKER_01 31:45 Yeah, I I I think it's kind of you you you know you you find what you want to find. So if you can't, if you have no evidence, you're finding exactly what it is, you make damn sure that the people around you believe that you did find it. So you come back with a nice creative story with the hardships, the whatever you went through, and you you might have been going, you know, 14 fields over and finding a grave that you knew of and just retrieving bones from it. But it it's all about the story, I suppose, uh around them and and the narrative that's built up in that same way. And I like I say, I think that the Chris uh Christian relics in Europe are just a great example of that. Where it's it's the story that matters, like even things like the Turin Shroud, I mean it's it's it has a lineage passed through all of these hands, it moved around, and it's kind of it became more convincing to some people that it was this religious relic, the more it had a storied history, the more it had been valued by others, so receiving it then became a prestigious thing. You had this thing, and I I think it's similar with with these human remains, but where were they getting the actual bones of Achilles? I seriously got that they had that like that that memory, that kind of that information, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 32:46 And do we see that there were particular bones in the body which seemed to be collected more often than other bones?

SPEAKER_01 32:54 Yeah, well, I mean in in in in our case they definitely had uh something of a fascination with the with the skull and with long bones. We don't tend to find shoulder blades or hips, you know, pelvis or scapulae. We don't find ribs, we don't find uh vertebrae from the spine. They're not commonly found in it when when they're redepositing bones. Like we even have one ditch um at an Iron Age site where they have a whole segment of this dish just full of human bones, but it's all long bones laid out neatly, and then the skulls are placed in one part altogether. But they they were focused on these, and I don't know, you you could get creative in trying to understand why. I mean you have the thinking part, you have the parts that move, the parts that are experienced, you're shaking hands at somebody, but that that's just me wildly speculating because I'm sure that that they had many, many different reasons. But it it is these bigger bones that tends to be the focus of of attention.

SPEAKER_00 33:47 Yeah, you could sort of imagine them using them as clubs for sort of gladiator style battles. Maybe that's why they collected the long ones. There's loads of reasons why it could have happened.

SPEAKER_01 33:57 Yeah, but we we we we we we don't get we we get them both uh complete and broken, and when they're broken, a lot of the time they seem to have been broken in what we call the perimortum stage. So they were broken while they were still a bit gooey. They weren't like dried old bones that are getting and breaking. So uh even in cases when they dig up bones from older burials, their ones we often find intact. It's the more recently deceased ones, it's only a couple of cases, but they seem to have been uh green, basically this the stage very soon after death when the bones are broken.

SPEAKER_00 34:29 You mentioned that this um society where you unearthed all of these bones being sort of scattered almost like litter was quite affluent. Do we expect that if you were to do uh more research in other affluent Bronze Age sites and settlements, we might find um the same, or or was this quite a unique location uh from what you're understanding? I'm convinced that we would.

SPEAKER_01 34:54 Yeah, I mean it's I mentioned that uh very early uh about my colleague Joe Brooke doing work like this over in England, and she was finding burials that um when they're originally excavated, people kind of uh counted as poorly recorded or a mistake in the excavation. You know, you've got two skulls from this burial, it's only one body and two skulls. What have you done? And so she was able to go back and look at the records and going, no, there was uh additional elements in this burial. Somebody had placed part of another person into this burial. So you know in Britain, we know in Ireland they were doing this, we know in in Czechia they're doing really macabre things with individuals there. You've a site called Velim, which is all uh it the ditch around the side is full of uh complete and disturbed human remains. So uh in Hungary they've got again lots and lots of human remains on settlements. Sometimes you'll have burials in pits where you've got most of the person, but then you know the right leg and the right arm might be missing. So it's it is a widerspread phenomenon, but I think part of it is where people looking when they were digging. It's only in recent years, maybe 20-30 years, that people have systematically retained animal bones when they're digging. And then, you know, uh these we studied later, and that's where we find often the human bones, because when you're digging, you're going through volumes of soil, it's a bone, it's a bone, it's a bone. You're not identifying that on the ground. So if you haven't been keeping the animal bones, you almost certainly, unless it was a complete burial, you weren't going to find and retain the human bones.

SPEAKER_00 36:20 Okay, yeah, because I guess the concept of the bones being pulled apart and dismantled and separated was perhaps just simply not on people's radar. I I think that's exactly it, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 36:32 So uh I I I suspect if we start looking more, we're definitely going to start finding a lot more. Uh I mean you you've burials within the settlement is commonplace from the Neolithic onwards, but they're kind of formal burials where they dig a pit and they place the person like beneath the ground. But we're looking at those these what you might call more anomalous burials where they're not necessarily buried uh in a specific um grave cut, that they're put into pits, they're put into bits of houses, they're they're put into ditches, but they're already half filled with rubbish. So they're not kind of creating a mortuary space. That that's quite different. But again, it's it's when we start looking, I think we're going to start finding it more frequently. And I've probably done some colleagues this service who are looking at this going, but we found it on our settlement. So I'm I'm sure that there's cases out there already that they haven't come to my attention, but I I know it's it's not going to be a unique thing that we found.

SPEAKER_00 37:23 And when you say this um site was sort of affluent, what does that mean in the Bronze Age? Because obviously our idea of affluence today is a bit different. Yeah, so um, how can you tell it was uh a site where people were um will had abundance? Yeah, that that's a that's a very good question.

SPEAKER_01 37:40 Um I mean we were for a long time in archaeology quite obsessed with finding elites and digging elite burials and these kind of things, or if we're digging a settlement trying to find the biggest building that might be the place of the king, something like this. It's only more recent years that we've been kind of looking more broadly at how settlements fit together and how they were built and how the communities kind of evolved within them. So in our case, we're looking at like at Corneshdy, you've got what's it uh that's a huge site, as I mentioned, that's like I think 35 kilometres of ditches. At our sites, uh, you know, a small site might be one or two kilometres of ditches, bigger sites maybe you know, seven, eight, nine kilometres of ditches. That's a huge investment. So they're actually they're they're kind of showing the affluence through building these big places, but we think within them that they're also using these to contain their their herds, and that gives us a sense of them having a lot of animals. So animals was a form of wealth, but it's not one we can we can identify so easily archaeologically. But also in the traditional sense, we've got just shed loads of bronze, they had a lot of metal, so they were making you know, dress pins, ornaments, razors, swords, spears, shields, armour, cooking devices, everything out of bronze. It was you're tripping over bronze. So they they they know shortage of metals, and then like we even found recently my colleagues, not me, my colleagues found uh on a gas pipeline they found a little pot just randomly in a field and just uh full of these little gold uh hair ornaments. So there was quite a bit of gold in circulation as well. We found it at a couple of settlements uh like uh Santana uh in Romania, which is uh close to us, and again there they found plenty of gold in that settlement. So all your key markers of affluence from the prehistoric world, having access to lots of metal, access to precious metals, uh sustaining large herds, having large human labour forces, these are all kind of you know symbols of of wealth and prosperity.

SPEAKER_00 39:36 And I know this is uh requires a bit of speculation as I as I've made you speculate quite a bit in this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do I do wonder if you have a a view on why we deal with the dead in the way that we do in the modern age. If in history we did treat them almost as sort of objects that we could take apart and put in our home. I know we've been through various iterations of burial, you know, obviously in ancient Egypt, those are very well known. But you know, today I I don't think I've ever seen a dead body in real life. I I I don't recall having ever seen one actually. Um I'm not even sure I've I've I've been to a funeral with an open casket. So do we do we see in archaeology when this transformation happened? And and have you got some ideas of why? Um it's it's hard to see if when it happened.

SPEAKER_01 40:30 I mean thinking in terms of things like globalisation, let's or blame globalization, but basically as our cities have developed, I mean, things have become so much less personal. Uh like we've we've millions of people living together, and cemeteries are a small, tiny, isolated part of these big communities. But when you go to rural communities, you still have a much closer link between the cemetery and and the the and the people living around it. And I think it's that break uh in larger settlements that's kind of broken tradition. Because in Ireland here we have this thing called the wake. When somebody dies, you don't you don't leave the dead body alone on the first night of death. So friends, relative, family will spend time with the body all night, they're not left in isolation. So you you do encounter dead bodies. I've encountered my grandfather, my grand aunts, uh spending time with them the night that they're dead. So we had that relation. Obviously, this is the complete integral body, we're not doing any bronze things to our relatives, yeah. But the it's that gap between death and life was narrower that we'd experienced a dead body. So you've got that sense of the timing of letting the person go. It's not they're dead and they're put in a coffin and they're removed from you. Yeah, you've you've that that transitional period. It's yeah, I think that's quite an important part of the mourning process. Yes, but um I I think with with the way things have gone, uh, you know, the family is often removed now from the burial process. If somebody dies, you're going to call I know this seems I'm I'm speaking very much about northwestern Europe when I when I talk about this, but I'm really speaking about my own experiences. Uh so you're going to call an undertaker, and you've got somebody from outside the family is going to take the body, remove it, and deal with all of the burial practices, preparing the body for burial, uh actually physically closing the coffin, all these tangible, tactile things that a person might get to say goodbye to the person and experience them. We're cut off from that now. But I I think it's also through the volume. That's a strange thing to say, but the volume of people, again, in larger cities and towns, the process has to be streamlined to actually manage to deal with this. It's when we look to our rural communities that we can still see the these surviving ideas.

SPEAKER_00 42:35 Yeah, I do wonder if they mourned better than in in ancient times, if they did grieve better in a way.

SPEAKER_01 42:41 I I think that there's more space for that, yeah, but it it it's even that the secularisation, like how many people are religious now? Do we believe in an afterlife, or do we believe when somebody's dead that you know that's then gone? So I suppose in some ways uh in in other societies, when you're expect when that person's going on a journey, the soul goes on a journey, you're going to engage with the body differently. And I think I think that makes makes an important uh contribution to how we deal with things differently now.

SPEAKER_00 43:05 And um, have you got any other ongoing work or anything that you're you're planning um that's really exciting at the moment, or um or even sort of not in the field of burial, anything that you'd love love to share?

SPEAKER_01 43:17 Well, I'm uh I I I'm uh stuck with human reigns for a period of time in the future because we're doing uh analyses of the genetics of these people. So over the last 20 years, especially over the last 10 years, we've been able to retrieve genetic data from ancient people. So because of that, we're able to look at things like uh how families are made up, we're able to look at things like migration, how people were moving, and broader stories about you know how societies were structured and how different groups of people experienced each other in the landscape. Uh so that's what we're working on now. That that's we've got preliminary findings, there's some quite exciting things coming out of that, uh, in terms of you know, sometimes people showing up where you weren't expecting people from a certain background to show up. Uh, you have other cases of um I'm speaking of my my my colleagues work in Crete where they've basically uh discovered that things like first cousin marriage was quite common, things that we count as a social taboo. So genetics has a huge amount to tell us, and we're at the s well, midway through that journey. So that that's I think some of our future publications quite soon will be on uh the story that that can tell us about these uh same societies.

SPEAKER_00 44:29 Amazing. Well, uh it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you. Barry Malloy, thank you for joining what we did before. Well, thank you very much for the invitation, and it was great chatting with you. A massive thank you to Barry Malloy. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. What we did before is independently made, so if you'd like to support us and help me make more episodes like this, there's a link in the description. Your support is greatly appreciated. I'm Molly Giu, and I will see you next time.