History Daily - Saturday Matinee: What We Did Before

Episode Date: June 13, 2026

On today’s Saturday Matinee, we dig into an archaeological discovery of human remains that left experts wondering why ancient people collected the bones of their dead. Link to What We Did Before: https://podfollow.com/what-we-did-before  Support the show! Join Into History for ad-free listening and more. History Daily is a co-production of Airship and Noiser.

Part of my fascination with history stems from the realization that we are them. What I mean here is that from the dawn of recorded history until now, not a lot of time has passed, certainly not on an evolutionary scale. We're better off today, of course, because of better nutrition, sanitation, and medicine. But we are fundamentally the same semi-haired apes we were back in the fourth millennium BCE when things first started getting written down. And that means if I were living in the past, I would be pretty much the same.

I might be uncomfortable, unwell, and illiterate, but, hey, so was everyone else. I'd be no different from those around me. And that's where the fascination comes in. If I didn't have a smartphone, which I didn't for most of my life, what would I be doing for information or entertainment? Going backwards, I'd be watching television,

or going to a movie, or listening to the radio, or reading a book, or catching a play, or heading to the tavern, or gossiping by the fire. I'd still be me, but my options would change. So how would I spend my time in 1635, in 1035, in 35? How would things be different and how would they be the same?

That's the premise of the podcast we're sharing today, what we did before. In the episode you're about to hear, archaeologists find an ancient Bronze Age settlement and uncover loads of human bones. But they weren't found in just one place like a burial ground. They were everywhere, as if the people were. People living then were collecting them. Is this what we did before funeral homes? I hope you enjoy.

While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow what we did before. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you. 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 prehistory, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew what 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 on the 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, your recent work looking at what are quite surprising burial practices of ancient people, if you can call them burial practices at all, because they weren't exactly burying their dead. In fact, your paper is titled the Unburied Dead. Can you tell me about the research that you've been doing?

Yeah, I could give you a little bit of background, I suppose. First, 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 1,500 to 1,200 BC. That's called the late Bronze Age, and it's a period where people might be familiar with things like 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 tell settlements, this big, big complex, I suppose, a society. in the area and it had collapsed sometime around 16,500 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 this really big, globalised Bronze Age world? So we went investigating the settlements of the area and we found these huge fortified sites and that was something quite unexpected. We didn't realize to find this like over a hundred of these massive fortified sites and that includes one that was known previously, which is called Cornish to Yorkuri, the biggest. bronze, the biggest prehistoric site in Europe, I think. It's massive, massive fortified site.

When you say fortified, how were they fortifying it? They were building ditches around the sites, often quite large ditches. They might be five, six meters across. They could be two, three, even four meters deep. And some of them then would have had walls like palisades that wooden and earthen walls going around the inside. So they were quite keen on keeping what they had inside and keeping people who wanted to take it on the outside. Is it, is this surprising because we didn't necessarily know they were doing this wide scale in the Bronze Age, this sort of complex architecture almost? Yeah, I mean, that was a surprise for us because we had known of Cornish D. Arcour, this massive site, and there was one or two others known.

So these are kind of seen as these isolated phenomena. But then our research, looking at aerial imagery, then going down onto the ground, driving around, finding these sites on the ground. Like I say, we discovered over 100 of these sites over the course of maybe, three or four years. So it went from knowing of one or two isolated sites to seeing this as a whole complex of these sites covering this whole landscape. And so you were there looking at these incredible fortifications. Did you expect to find what you did in terms of the sort of ancient burial practices? Well, that was the thing. We were interested in learning with 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, even when a slightly later period going to about 900 BC, 800 BC, we're finding humans in 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 are finding them. So, you know, the cemeteries, so we thought that's where they're putting the dead, but no. 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. Yeah, yeah. It was, I mean, we've only dug, like the sites we're digging, we might have dug 0.01% of the site. And literally every single trench we're finding human remains. Often it's more 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. What condition are these human remains in when you do find them? They can be quite varied. 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 a 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 are 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 complete remains, disturbed remains and bits of remains on these settlements. 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? Well, it seems even then

there was a couple of different reasons, and I can say it's not as care as we'd like it to be, but what we did is a new method of histotaphonomy, which is my colleague Tom Booth over here in the Crick Institute in London. He uses CT scans at 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 in the ground very soon? after death. And we are finding examples of bones that had been exposed straight after death. They're exposed for a period of time to the elements. And that leans into this burial practice we call it 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, we don't get rodent gnaw marks like rats or mice or anything climbing aboard to start chewing 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. You know, that's quite gooey. Maybe in our view at least, not how we normally expect the treatment of the dead to take place. But we had like one example where the cranial vault had been cracked open with something like an axe. So we don't know if that was breaking the head apart to break it or were they actually trying to access the brain.

But a net effect is they were getting inside the skull. And that was very soon after death. So accessing the brain, we know that at least in sort of ancient Egypt, 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. It's only 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 lighter? and more decorative. I'm afraid with the fragments we get,

we just can't tell that. We don't have the complete body. All that we have remaining is that tiny small fragment of the skull that tells us that they had, you know, accessed it. They'd broken it and they'd accessed it. So, you know, we were between,

was it the brain that they were after or was deconstructing the skull that they were looking to do? I know we've one other case where we've got, again, this was not what you expect when you're excavating. We found the frontal bone of a person. So basically from around here

back to the middle of the head. just this top part of the skull, but it had a hole in it. And we'd expect something 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 stake.

Something had gone probably when it was a complete skull, it had gone through the base of the skull, now 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 appear to have been putting heads on spikes there. So we can't tell that, but it has the physical characteristics that would be like, you know,

someone that put this on a spike. Yeah. So either 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, those are two possibilities, right? They could be, yeah. And I mean, the thing is we find these in the ditches surrounding the size. 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. And we find these at the boundaries. 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. everybody coming in and leaving that would have seen it. So, yeah, part and parts of your experience of visiting these places. Wow, that's fascinating. I'm sort of building up this mental image of it now. It kind of looks quite gothic in a way. Tell me a little bit more about exclamation,

because this seems like a strange practice to leave the body exposed to the air to decompose like that outside of a graham. rave. Why would that have been a practice by ancient people? That's a, yeah, it's a challenging question. I mean, we don't have enough dead people in cemeteries. So 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're all you'm sure your viewers although 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 fragments tend to be quite large you can pick them up and see them it's not like the modern day cremation when you get the ashes back this is kind of burnt bone

but they only went and retrieved some of these bones and put them into the urine. So 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 were put in a river. But the other 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 burnt. So exclamation, the body's going to basically decompose it to its parts, and they can be dealt with separately then from decomposition rather than fire. Do you think that's potentially because we hadn't developed formal religion by this point, and so the body was seen more practically than spiritually like it is today? I think we have this sense of the body and the individual.

My colleague Joe Brooke in Dublin has done a lot of work on this, but this idea of that we see that when a person dies, that the 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-great-grandfather's name or a great-grandmother's name on it. And I can, you know, think back to that as an individual. But 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 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 this kind of generalized sense of ancestors. And we think that that's part of what's happening with the human remains, that when they're buried, they can be broken apart. And 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. 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 there was no typical way of burying or dealing with the dead in ancient times. There doesn't seem to be a practice that was more common than others, would you agree? I would. I always think if I lived in prehistory, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew what was happening, you know, 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, our biggest, challenge is a lot of these don't leave archaeological traces. You know, we're so lucky to have

accessed the materials to have understood that this was excarnation because we found these few bones and using this CT scanning method we're able to define, yeah, exclamation 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. And so can we speculate a little bit about what these bones would have been used for day-to-day or like in the home, for instance. Why would they have been retrieving and collecting these bones other than just to represent the ancestors? My suspicion is they're doing it for a variety of reasons. I mean, there's even doubt to disrespecting the dead. Like, you know,

this could be the body. We often think of this in terms of the ancestors. You're getting the, you're retrieving the body of someone who 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 retrieving bones from burials and they're also, they're retrieving bones of excresations. 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 the community. And we've no idea if that was all one thing. Like there might have been, we've one side vat in where you had a bunch of skulls just outside of a house. So you might imagine in

that context, these schools 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 and entered that function. And then, you know, they might have been treated, not quite like garbage, but basically when that meaning had transformed, they weren't needed anymore. So they're placed outside the house. And these were found outside of a house in a rubbish tip. So again, one reading is, oh, they didn't care about these people, 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 their purpose. They had been there for 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 broken apart or complete crania placed into pits in the ground alongside 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? 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. Yeah, 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 were just to start pulling a part of body and putting the arm bone in one house and their feet in another, for instance. 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 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, so that you can sell it. That's what happens. the next generation, their parents die and they say, oh, 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 way of respecting the dead 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 made that separation almost

intentionally. Maybe it was a healthy way to be in ancient times. It was. We have this, as we say, this real division between death and life, even in terms of the way we experienced dead people. It's in a cemetery. It's in a very specific part. Like we look at 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 lived life. And if you want to engage with the dead, you go to this walled off place, a secluded place, it's marked with very particular monuments. 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 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're dead people all around you. And I mean,

that can be the recent deceased. It can be like 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 thinking even of

you've got in Iron Age Greece you've got these hero cults where they actually went around plundering Bronze Age graves that was their age of heroes and they were looking for Odysseus and I get them known 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 have the bone of Achilles and this is going to bring great fortune to our family so there's also that intergenerational gap that we have this kind of sense of like I said earlier

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 really seems weird to us. But in these times, they were a very, very different, I suppose, moral sense of what the human body meant, in part or in whole. A different sense of grave robbing back then, a more heroic than it might potentially be seen now. And also, I don't know whether it would have been 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. That's true as well, yeah. I mean, it's, it's very hard archaeologically

to get that time span, that the relics of remains of 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, it can relate to that kind of managing loss, managing the emotional experience of it. You obviously see, you know, ancient Dice, for instance, were often made of bone, not human bone, but made of bone. Could you imagine, given that their presence in the home was so abundant, potentially these were being used as tools or some sort of, 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 in the Bronze Age? Well, we're looking at quite prosperous societies here, so I don't think there would have been needs most treatment to it but I think human remains while they were material culture they were still treated as being human

in some sense they didn't lose that human value so they didn't become kind of a utilitarian parts of human culture I know there's other examples of prehistory of using human skull fragments to make combs, things like this

but again I think that's really really 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. In our case, we've got one settlement to be excavated at Sacula, where we had a human femur. And it was a part of it. And 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.

There was a dog sitting down, happily chewing away on some relative or some ancestor or 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 in the same domestic area. Yeah. It's sort of expected you could say.

Deeper respect for recycling that they had. And 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, 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 relatives? We do, going back into the late Upper Paleolithic, so going back into 12,000 BC, something like this, 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, 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 could be like cave burials, there could be river burials, there can be river burials, to 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 it going back deeper in time but that doesn't mean that people weren't treating the human body in a ritual at death in a particular manner because we have those examples from

like Shandidarkave in Iraq of the Neanderthal burials. There's also in La Chappelle in France the Neanderthal burials. We even have it in South Africa and Rising Star Cave you've got the Homo Nalidi which is

a, it's pre-human, but kind of not... 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, 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 think mortuary practices and 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 lineage. Yeah, and on the podcast recently, we actually tackled this new research from Tinshamath Cave in Israel, where it suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have collaborated in many respects

on the evolution of their culture and their beliefs and potentially their burial practices, as well. So it's possible you go back to Neanderthal burial that Homo sapiens were sort of learning from what they were doing.

I mean, this is fully possible. I'm reminded of a, when I was an undergraduate in the last millennium, I was an undergraduate in the 1990s. There was a lecture on Neanderthal society, shall we say. The speaker at the end, the question was asked, you know, would humans

and Neanderthals perhaps of 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 don't know this complexity there but in terms of maybe the Neanderthals 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. 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 collaboration. And do we have signs of other, you've talked about cave burials, river burials. Are there any other practices that humans have used throughout history that archaeology has been able to, cover or maybe any particularly surprising ones? Well, we seem to be infinitely creative with how we deal with the dead when we go back. When you look in a global perspective. I mean, as many people will know, for example, you've got those, the child burials, the Peruvian mummies, if these child burials in the caves high in the Andes, where they were kind of tightly

bound together and placed into caves. We have throughout northwestern Europe and quite a few examples in Ireland of these. bog bodies where I suppose burial might be glorified by saying what happened to them because they were downright nasty what happened to these people. They were people brought to the bogs

and they were killed in myriad different ways. Yeah, one or two examples from Ireland where you can see the variety of treatments and they didn't die well but they were placed into the bog afterwards. That's the use of the body. It's not how we consider burial. The body's been used in a ritual there

perhaps to mark a space, perhaps to have a transformative effect on the landscape. We have osseuries, 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 a space where there is just loads of other human remains.

So the body is disaggregated and just put with others. And we have really bizarre versions of that. you've got the Settletch church over in Czechia, where they've got the entire church inside is decorated with human remains. And it's, I mean, the chandelier is made from human bones. There's the pillars are decorated with human bones. And again, it seems macabre, but that's because the church itself is built on,

the stories it's built on soil brought back from the Holy Land, as they have it in that religion. And 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 think it's down to, for us, the body is inseparable. When you die, we believe it should be treated together as a holistic thing. But there's so many examples throughout world where the body will be disaggregated

and used in very creative in different ways. Is it possible that, especially given your recent research, bones could have been used as some form of currency? Or would you see, like, markings which would, determine that more clearly if it was the case that these were used for trading or some other form of currency like that? We don't have anything that would

necessarily say that they were used as currency but again there can be that sense of value in relics and value in specific things because when you look at medieval times saintly relics were actually traded I mean are chips of the true cross I mean I'm sure if there was enough

chips of wood there to build a cathedral out of the of chips of the true cross circulating. But with human remains as well, like we've got St. Valentine in Dublin here where I live, 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 the heroes of the heroic age, of the Bronze Age, and that these were often, people were told by the Delphic Argyll, go find these.

So in that sense, bones could have value, but I think it's the culture embedded value that it was a bone of someone or something rather than the bone itself having value intrinsically because it is bone. How accurately could they have determined whether they really had unearthed Achilles heel, for instance, a bone of an ancient hero? Obviously, even now, we've got incredible ability to sort of map genetics and really, you know, this new research that you've been doing as well, looking at how long it's been.

exposed to the elements. Was a lot of it just story and legend in terms of what they are on Earth and what they called it and what a society was willing to believe who that bone belonged to? Yeah, I think it's kind of, you know, 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, you're the hardships, the whatever you went through. 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's all about the story, I suppose, around them, and the narrative that's built up in that same way. And like I say, I think the Christian relics in Europe are just a great example of that, where it's the story that matters, like even things like the Turin shroud. I mean, it's, it has a lineage. Passed through all of these hands that moved around. And it's kind of, it became more convincing to some people that it was this religious

the more it had a story of history, the more it had been valued by others. So receiving it then became a prestigious thing. You had this thing. And I think it's similar with these human remains, but were they getting the actual bones of Achilles? I seriously got out the day of that memory, that kind of, that information, yeah. And do we see that there were particular bones in the body which seemed to be collected more often than other bones? Yeah, well, I mean, in our case, they definitely had something of a fascination with the skull and with long bones. We don't tend to find shoulder blades or hips,

you know, pelvis or scapulet. We don't find ribs. You don't find vertebrae from the spine. They're not commonly found when they're redepositing bones. We even have one ditch 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 were focused on these and I don't know you could get creative in trying to understand why you have the thinking part if the parts that move the parts that we're experienced

or you're shaking hands at somebody but that's just me wildly speculated because I'm sure that they had many many different reasons but it is these bigger bones that tends to be the focus of attention yeah you can 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 things like it could have happened. Yeah, we don't get, we get them both complete and broken. And when they're broken, a lot of the time,

they seem to have been broken in what we call the perimortem stage. So they were broken, well, they were still a bit gooey. They weren't like dried old bones that are getting and breaking. So 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 green. basically the stage very soon after death when the bones were broken. You mentioned that this 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 more research in other affluent Bronze Age sites and settlements, we might find the same?

Or was this quite a unique location from what you're understanding? I'm convinced that we would, yeah. I mean, I mentioned very early about my colleague Joe Brooke doing work like this over in England, and she was finding burials that when they're originally excavated, people kind of count it as poorly recorded or a mistake in the excavation. 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 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 Czechia, they're doing really macabre things with individuals there. You have a site called Vellim, which is all the ditch around the side is full of complete and disturbed human remains. So in Hungary, they've got, again, lots and lots of human remains on settlements.

Sometimes you'll have burials and pits where you've got most of the person, but then, you know, the right leg of the right arm might be missing. So it is a wider spread phenomenon. But I think part of it is where people look at it. 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, these are 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 identified 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. 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 think that's exactly it, yeah. So I suspect if we start looking more, we're definitely going to start finding a lot more. I mean, you have burials within the settlement is commonplace from the Neolithic onwards, but they're kind of formal burials for the dig a pit and the place the person like beneath the ground. but we're looking at those, these,

which might recall more anomalous burials where they're not necessarily buried in a specific grave cut, that they're put into pits, they're putting the bits of houses, they're put into ditches, they're already half filled with rubbish.

So they're not kind of creating a mortuary space. That's quite different. But again, it's when we start looking, I think we're going to start finding it more frequently. And I've probably done some colleagues at this service who are looking at this going, but we found it on our settlement.

So I'm sure that there is cases out there. already. They haven't come to my attention, but I know it's not going to be a unique thing that we found. And when you say this site was sort of affluent, what does that mean in the Brum's Age? Because obviously our idea of affluence today is a bit different. Yeah, so how can you tell it was a site where people were, well, had abundance? Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, we were for a long time in archaeology quite obsessed but finding elites and digging elite burials and these kind of things are if we're digging a settlement

and 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 communities evolved within them. So in our case, we're looking at, like at Cornishdi, you've got, what's it,

that's a huge site, as I mentioned. That's like, I think, 35 kilometres of ditches. At our sites, you know, a small site might be one or two, kilometers of ditches, bigger sites, maybe, you know, 7, 8, 9 kilometers of ditches. That's a huge investment. So they're actually, 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 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 when 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 armor cooking devices

everything out of bronze it was you're tripping over bronze so they had no shortage of metals and then like we even found recently my colleagues not me my colleagues found on a gas pipeline they found a little pot just randomly in a field and just full of these little gold

hair ornaments so there was quite a bit of gold in circulation as well We find that a couple of settlements like Santana in Romania, which is 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, sustaining large herds, having large human labour forces. These are all kind of, you know, symbols of wealth and prosperity. And I know this requires a bit of speculation, as I've made you speculate quite a bit in this. episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I do wonder if you have 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 don't think I've ever seen a dead body in real life. I, I, I don't think I've ever seen a dead body in real life. I don't recall having ever seen one, actually. I'm not even sure I've been to a funeral with an open casket. So do we see in archaeology when this transformation happened? And have you got some ideas of why? It's hard to see when it happened. I mean, thinking in terms of things that globalisation, or blame globalization, but basically as our cities

have developed. I mean, things have become so much less personal. Like 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 the people

living around it. And I think it's that break 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 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 do encounter dead bodies. I've encountered my grandfather or my granddance, 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 bronzed things to our relatives. Yeah.

But it's that gap between death and life was narrower, that we'd experience the 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 the coffin and they're removed from you. You've that transitional period. I think that's quite an important part of the mourning process. Yes. But I think with the way things have gone, 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 speaking very much about northwestern Europe when I talk about this, but I'm really speaking about my own experiences. 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, 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. 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, you can still see these surviving ideas.

Yeah, I do wonder if they mourned better than in ancient times, if they did grieve better in a way. I think that there's more space for that, yeah, but it's even that to secularisation, like how many people are religious now? Do we believe in an afterlife or do we believe in some of these days that's then gone? So I suppose in some ways in other societies, when that person's going on a journey, their soul goes in a journey, you're going to engage with the body differently. I think that makes an important contribution to how we deal with things differently now. And have you got any other ongoing work or anything that you're planning that's really exciting at the moment or even sort of not in the field of burial anything that you'd love to share? Well, I'm stuck with human remains for a period of time in the future because we're doing 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.

people. So because of that, we're able to look at things like how families are made up. We're able to look at things at 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. So that's what we're working on now. We've got preliminary findings. There's some quite exciting things coming out of that in terms of, you know, sometimes people showing up where you weren't expecting people from a certain background to show up. You have other cases of,

I'm speaking of my colleague's work in Crete, where they've basically 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, well, midway through that journey.

So that's, I think some of our future publications quite soon will be on the story that that can tell us about these same societies. Amazing. Well, 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.