Bronze Age urned cremation burials of Mainland Scotland : mortuary ritual and cremation technology
Abstract
Tracing the treatment of the body before, during and after cremation, this thesis
aims to reconstruct and theorise the mortuary rituals associated with urned
cremation burial in Bronze Age Scotland. It is an attempt to bridge the gap between
theoretical perspectives from funerary archaeology and up-to-date methods
for understanding heat-related changes to bone from osteoarchaeology and
forensic anthropology. As with other types of mortuary treatment, the physical
aspects of cremation detected by osteological analysis are interconnected with
the meaning and symbolism of the ritual.
The research involved the osteological analysis of a sample of urned cremation
burials from the collections of The National Museums of Scotland. The
analysis aimed to estimate not only the age at death and sex of the remains,
but also to investigate factors such as the number of individuals in an urn, the
effectiveness of the cremation process, whether the bodies had been cremated
as fresh corpses or dry bones, the position of the body on the pyre, the range
of pyre goods and the selection of remains included in the urns. In total, 75
urned cremation burials from 50 sites were analysed, a significant addition to
the corpus of osteologically analysed Bronze Age urned burials from the Scottish
Mainland. The results suggested a significant discrepancy between how fleshed
bodies and bodies which had been through the pyre were perceived. Whereas
fresh corpses were not modified, the burnt remains could be extensively manipulated
until their final deposition within the urn.