Scottish Islands Explorer 40: Nov / Dec 2016

The Cladh Hallan Mummies
The First Evidence
In other words, they had been deliberately mummified
before burial. e mummification had not been immediately
evident because the so tissue that would have been
preserved in the process had decayed aer burial, leaving just
the bones remaining. is was the first evidence for such a
practice to be found anywhere in Britain.
So-called ‘bog bodies’ are known from the Iron Age across
northern Europe (such as Gunnister Man in Shetland and
Lindow Man in Cheshire), but these were people le
permanently in bogs and later found with surviving so
tissue. e Cladh Hallan mummies represent something
altogether different because they were later removed from the
bog for an extended period before burial, suggesting that
some people were aware of the preservative powers of peat
bogs much earlier than the Iron Age.
Stranger still, it was discovered that the male skeleton was a
composite - that is, it was made up of the bones of at least
three men who had died between 1500 - 1350 BC. Work
published in 2012 examined the remains of the female
skeleton and concluded that this one was also a composite,
made up of at least three contributors who died at later dates
than the males, somewhere between 1300 - 1130 BC.
The Remains of Different People
All of these dates are significantly earlier than the time the
roundhouses were constructed and the burials took place.
e first question that we might therefore ask is why these
ancient islanders compiled skeletons from the remains of
different people? Could it have been a case of simple carelessness
on behalf of those tasked with caring for these remains?
is perhaps seems unlikely given the elaborate care by
which these people were placed in a bog, then removed and
kept above ground for considerable periods of time before
burial; if the bodies meant enough to the community to want
to preserve them in this way, then surely they would have kept
individual bodies intact if this was also important to them.
We might then conclude that this mixing of bones was
intentional. Some archaeologists have suggested this act
might be a way of deliberately merging the identities of the
individuals that made up the composite skeletons, perhaps as
a way of joining together different ancestral lines into one
powerful whole.
Yet to be Discovered
It also suggests that there was enough space and resources in
this community to keep multiple sets of remains in a sufficiently
warm, dry environment to inhibit so tissue decay for extensive
periods of time, perhaps in yet to be discovered “mummy houses”.
e second question raised by these strange finds is why
these people were making mummies at all. Motives for the
deliberate mummification of the deceased vary across the
22 SCOTTISH ISLANDS EXPLORER NOVEMBER / DECEMBER 2016