Cladh Hallan

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Cladh Hallan

Cladh Hallan is an archaeological site on the Scottish island of South Uist in the Outer Hebrides . It is the only site in Great Britain where prehistoric mummies have been found, which are also the oldest mummies in Europe .

excavation

Cladh Hallan

Between 1988 and 2002, three Bronze Age round houses were excavated in Cladh Hallan , which belonged to a settlement with about seven buildings. In 2001 archaeologists found several human skeletons under the floors of two round houses . At first, the researchers could not see that there were former mummies, as the dead apparently had received a conventional burial and all soft tissue had passed. The unusually strong crouching posture of the corpses reminded excavator Mike Parker Pearson of the University of Sheffield of Peruvian mummies. The relatively good state of preservation of the skeletons, which were in an anatomically correct composite, was also unusual .

The remains and other archaeological finds from Cladh Hallan are examined in laboratories in Scotland, England and Wales. They are to be transferred to a Scottish museum after the research has been completed and the results have been published. At the place of discovery, information boards provide information about the building findings and the first results of the scientific investigations.
Location: 57 ° 10 ′ 18.5 ″  N , 7 ° 24 ′ 37.2 ″  W Coordinates: 57 ° 10 ′ 18.5 ″  N , 7 ° 24 ′ 37.2 ″  W

Building findings

The three excavated houses formed a unit with common walls. The floors of the houses were somewhat sunk into the ground. The walls consisted of an inner and outer layer of stone, the space between which was filled with sand. The construction of the houses began around 1000 BC, and the mummies of several people, some hundreds of years old, that of a sheep , but also recently deceased children were buried under the floors of the houses. After a few decades, the ashes of some children were deposited in the northern house together with broken ceramic vessels and three broken millstones . The walls of some houses were filled with unfired ceramic vessels. The houses were demolished several times only to be rebuilt only a few meters apart. Around 900 BC, another child was buried in the northern house and shortly afterwards the building was moved two meters. The north and middle house were used for cultic purposes for several hundred years, in them ceramic vessels, implements made of bone and horn as well as animal burials were deposited. The northern house was abandoned around 700 BC, while the middle one was only abandoned around 400 BC, making it one of the longest-used buildings in prehistoric Great Britain. The entrances to all but one of the houses faced east. All houses had a central fireplace. After the abandonment of this place, the residents moved their settlement about 300–400 meters to the north and south.

Anthropological Findings

Composition of the male mummy:
blue: man around 1600 BC
yellow: man around 1500–1400 BC
red: man around 1440–1360 BC

Skeletons of several people were recovered from the floors of the houses. The mummified skeletons of a woman, a man and a sheep come from the northern house. In particular, the skeletons of the woman and one man showed signs of post-mortem manipulation. The mercury porosimetric analysis of the bones showed that they were only weakly decomposed by the body's own bacteria from the digestive tract, which indicates a possible removal of the internal organs after death.

child

A 10-14 year old child, believed to be a girl, whose remains were not mummified, was found under the middle house.

small child

The mummified skeleton of an approximately three-year-old child who died around 1400–1300 BC was found under the floor of the southern house.

man

The burial of a three-individual skeleton of a man about 20 years old who died about 1600 BC was found under the northern house. This skeleton carried the skull and cervical vertebrae of a second man, who had only died 1500–1400 BC, and the lower jaw of a third man. It is believed that the assembled body was buried around 1440–1260 BC, long before the houses were built.

woman

In the southern part of the northern house, the skeleton of a 40-year-old woman was found who was relatively old for her time. The woman lay on her left side, while her left thigh and lower leg bones were buried outside the house in a funeral pit. After death, two incisors ( tooth formula 12, 22) were removed from the upper jaw and one was placed in each of her hands. The manipulation of this skeleton was suspected for the first time after more exact osteological investigations and could be confirmed by DNA analyzes of samples from the lower jaw, skull, arm and leg bones. These showed that this skeleton was also composed of bones from different individuals who were not related to one another. The torso is that of an adult woman, whereas the head and lower jaw osteologically tend to be more masculine. The dating of two bones from the body skeleton resulted in an average date from 1370 to 1050 BC, whereas the head dated to the period around 1440-1260 BC. Isotope analysis of the skeleton revealed slight differences between the skull and the femur , but it was not yet possible to deduce with certainty that these too came from different individuals. By means of DNA analysis, on the other hand, it was almost certain that the skull, lower jaw, thighbones and humerus bones came from three, but possibly also from four different individuals.

interpretation

Based on the structural findings and the results of the forensic examinations, all these bodies were buried in the earth graves around 1000 BC, i.e. 300 to 600 years after the deaths of the individuals determined by radiocarbon dating . At this point in time, the skeletons made up of different individuals were probably also put together.

The remains of the dead indicate that they were artificially preserved . According to previous knowledge, they must have been stored in a bog for about 6 to 18 months shortly after their death . The length of time the corpses stayed in the bog was just long enough that their soft tissues were tanned by the moor acid , but the bones were hardly demineralized . Only the outer two millimeters of the bone mass showed demineralization. Apparently the bog corpses preserved in this way were then recovered, brought back to the domestic areas and stored in a warm and dry place so that they survived the next 300 to 600 years until their final burial. The corpses, especially those of the woman, show an unnaturally tight crouching posture , which may have been achieved by bandaging them.

Possible backgrounds

This complex of finds raises numerous questions that are difficult to answer from the finds alone. According to the location of the finds, the settlement was not only used for cult, but also for residential purposes. It can no longer be proven with certainty whether the special treatment of the corpses has a purely cultic connection or whether it was a form of burial that was customary in the region. Nor is it clear why the bodies were not finally buried until centuries later. It is possible that the deceased played a high social role and were the subject of an ancestral cult . The replacement or addition of individual body parts could be an attempt to repair damaged or lost parts of the mummy, whereby an accidental loss of two heads is considered rather unlikely. According to other theories, the intention behind the addition of body parts could be to adapt the appearance of the mummies to the changing currents of the cult, or to include further kinship lines in the ancestral cult by adding them . Most likely the mummies were kept in a specially built building. It is also impossible to establish whether the buried under the floors had a function as a building sacrifice . The removal of the mummies from the previous area through their burial suggests a fundamental change in religious beliefs.

See also

literature

  • Jayd Hanna, Abigail S. Bouwman, Keri A. Brown, Mike Parker Pearson , Trence A. Brown: Ancient DNA typing shows that a Bronze Age mummy is a composite of different skeletons . In: Journal of Archaeological Science . No. 39 , 2012, ISSN  0305-4403 , p. 2774–2779 , doi : 10.1016 / j.jas.2012.04.030 (English).
  • Michael Parker Pearson , Chamberlain, Collins, Cox, Craig, Craig, Hiller, Marshall, Mulville, Smith: Further evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain . In: Antiquity . tape 81 , no. 312 , September 2007, ISSN  0003-598X (English, antiquity.ac.uk [accessed October 14, 2009]).
  • Michael Parker Pearson , Chamberlain, Collins, Craig, Marshall, Mulville, Smith, Chenery, Cook, Craig, Evans, Hiller, Montgomery, Schwenninger, Taylor, Wess: Evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain . In: Antiquity . tape 79 , 2005, ISSN  0003-598X , p. 529-546 (English).
  • Michael Parker Pearson , Niall Sharples, Jim Symonds: South Uist . Archeology and History of a Hebridean Island . Tempus, Stroud 2004, ISBN 0-7524-2905-1 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Cladh Hallain Wheelhouse at www.streetmap.co.uk.
  2. ↑ a b c d e f Jayd Hanna, Abigail S. Bouwman, Keri A. Brown, Mike Parker Pearson , Trence A. Brown: Ancient DNA typing shows that a Bronze Age mummy is a composite of different skeletons . In: Journal of Archaeological Science . No. 39 , 2012, ISSN  0305-4403 , p. 2774–2779 , doi : 10.1016 / j.jas.2012.04.030 (English).
  3. ^ A b c d Michael Parker Pearson , Chamberlain, Collins, Cox, Craig, Craig, Hiller, Marshall, Mulville, Smith: Further evidence for mummification in Bronze Age Britain . In: Antiquity . tape 81 , no. 312 , September 2007, ISSN  0003-598X (English, antiquity.ac.uk [accessed October 14, 2009]).