Ancestors from communities some 4,500 years ago crafted musical instruments out of bones and displayed them in their houses to commemorate the loss of relatives and friends, with bones found in possession of ancient peoples dating just a few decades before their own death, University of Bristol academics have suggested.
Thigh bone instruments
There is already evidence people living in Britain during the Bronze Age practiced a range of funerary rites, including primary burial, excarnation, cremation and mummification. However, this research reveals the dead were not just commemorated through funeral rites, but that human remains were regularly kept and circulated amongst the living.
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In one extraordinary case from Wiltshire, a human thigh bone had been crafted to make a musical instrument, included as a grave good [an item buried alongside a body] with the burial of a man found close to Stonehenge.
The carefully carved and polished artefact, found with other items, including stone and bronze axes, a bone plate, a tusk, and a unique ceremonial pronged object, are displayed in the Wiltshire Museum. Radiocarbon dating of this musical instrument suggests it belonged to someone this person knew during their lifetime.
At Windmill Fields, Stockton-on-Tees, a woman was buried with skulls and limb bones from at least three other people who died an estimated 60 to 170 years before her. A ceremonial box of bones, containing remains all of a similar age to those buried with the woman was also found next to her body.
“The micro-CT scanning suggested these bones had come from bodies that had been treated in similar ways to what we see for Bronze Age human remains more generally, said lead author, Dr Thomas Booth, who carried out the radiocarbon dating work at the University of Bristol’s School of Chemistry. “Some had been cremated before being split up, some bones were exhumed after burial, and some had been de-fleshed by being left to decompose on the ground.
“Even in modern secular societies, human remains are seen as particularly powerful objects, and this seems to hold true for people of the Bronze Age. However, they treated and interacted with the dead in ways which are inconceivably macabre to us today,” he added.
The bones of the dead
While the findings, led by the University of Bristol and published in the journal Antiquity, may seem eerie or even gruesome by today’s conventions, they indicate a tangible way of honouring and remembering known individuals between close communities and generations some 4,500 years ago.
“Although fragments of human bone were included as grave goods with the dead, they were also kept in the homes of the living, buried under house floors and even placed on display”, said Professor Joanna Brück, principal investigator on the project, and visiting Professor at the University of Bristol’s Department of Anthropology and Archaeology.
“This suggests that Bronze Age people did not view human remains with the sense of horror or disgust that we might feel today.”
While later ancestors focused on procuring and honouring the remains of spiritual figures, Ancient Britons commemorated those in living memory.
“This study really highlights the strangeness and perhaps the unknowable nature of the distant past from a present-day perspective. It seems the power of these human remains lay in the way they referenced tangible relationships between people in these communities and not as a way of connecting people with a distant mythical past,” said Dr Booth.