Ceremonial dismemberment and excarnation in prehistoric Ireland - a different way to treat the dead

For a while, I've been wondering about how the small human bone fragments that have been found in some Irish passage-tombs came to be in such a fragmented condition. In terms of the unburnt bone human fragments found during the O'Kelly excavations at Newgrange, "apart from some complete hand and foot bones, all human specimens consisted of small fragments". (O'Kelly, Newgrange: Archaeology, Art & Legend, Thames & Hudson, 1982). 

Replica of basin stone from Knowth's eastern chamber with bone fragments.

There were a total of 750 unidentifiable fragments. The fragmented remains of dozens of individuals were found in the chambers of nearby Knowth. Layers of fragmented remains were found in the passage and chamber of Fourknocks. So how do human bones - those that are not cremated - become so fragmented?

Searching through my extensive archive of research material, I found an interesting article from the Sunday Times from July 2003. Eileen Murphy of Queen's University Belfast had studied Irish neolithic bones and found that our early ancestors had dismembered and defleshed their dead. Murphy had worked on the excavation of graves in Aymyrlyg graves in Siberia, Russia.

There she learnt to look for the tell-tale signs of what is thought to have been an ancient religious practice - short, fine scraping marks on the bone and cuts where tendons and ligaments were joined.
"After studying the dismembered and refleshed Russian remains, I decided to have another look at Irish neolithic bones. It is something that has been overlooked before and will now require a reassessment of our understanding of these ancient burial sites.

The researchers from Queen's made the findings when examining bones from the 4,000-year-old Millin Bay tomb in County Down, and the discoveries mirrored those found by Swedish archaeologists at Carrowmore in Co. Sligo. The Sunday Times article described how body parts, notably skulls, are thought to have been kept on display for religious purposes.

Gabriel Cooney, professor of archaeology at University College Dublin, told the newspaper:

In these tombs you rarely find single skeletons, but rather groups of cremated remains. In this way these neolithic people would seem to have been creating a new identity from their treatment of the dead. You also find different parts of the body treated in different ways, such as unburnt parts of the skull in with cremated remains. This would point to dismembering of the corpses.

Were the Brugh na Bóinne bones defleshed by humans or
by the process of natural outdoor excarnation?

Not all corpses were dismembered by other humans. The process known as excarnation, or defleshing , is well documented. This involves leaving the human corpse out in the open (sometimes known as sky burial), or in a cave, for the elements and wildlife to assist in the process of speedy decomposition and dismemberment. Some "excarnation sites" were outdoors, while others were in caves. It is estimated that a human corpse left out in the open can be reduced to a pile of bones in a matter of weeks or months. However, there seems to have been a deliberate effort made, in some cases, to slow down the process of excarnation by leaving a corpse in a cave.

A chance finding of a bone fragment in a cave at Knocknarea in Sligo led to the discovery of more bone fragments belonging to an adult and a child which may have been evidence of cave excarnation. Radiocarbon dating put the age of the bones at over 5,000 years old. It is thought that the process of excarnation in a cave took much longer - perhaps up to two years - but eventually the deceased's relatives would come back to collect the bones for burial elsewhere. In the case of Knocknarea, this burial might have taken place in one of several monuments on the top of the mountain.

We can imagine, therefore, that Stone Age people in Sligo between 5,000 and 5,500 years ago carried the corpses of their dead up the mountain. After an arduous climb, they then squeezed through the narrow cave entrance, and laid the dead person on the cave floor. (Source)

What's also interesting in Ireland is that osteoarchaeological analysis has revealed an absence of animal scavenging marks, suggesting that the entrance to the excarnation caves was sealed during the process of soft tissue decomposition.

This reveals a conscious decision not to speed up decomposition . . . By creating a protective environment in which excarnation took place undisturbed, people controlled the process, pace and space. The living may have sought to observe the slow and gradual disintegration that was taking place inside a cave. The underground was therefore a place of transformation, which in turn transformed caves as places. It may have been in caves that the journey into the spirit world commenced. (Dowd, Marion, The Archaeology of Caves in Ireland, Oxbow Books, 2015, p. 106)

Flint blades from Newgrange - were these used in the defleshing process?

There are no caves in the vicinity of the great passage-tombs of the Boyne Valley. It would be interesting to postulate on how the fragmented unburnt remains there - and indeed at nearby Fourknocks - came to be in that condition. Of course another question that begs to be asked is how many of the flint scrapers and other flint tools found at Newgrange and other passage-tombs were used in the defleshing of human remains . . .

Neolithic passage-tomb construction - mutual cooperation or enforced labour?

I'm reading a fantastic book about ancient Ireland right now, written by an archaeologist. It's called 'The Origins of the Irish' by J.P. Mallory of Queens University and it's one of the best books about prehistoric Ireland that I've ever read. Admittedly it's not exclusively about prehistory, and admittedly I'm not finished reading it yet! But on almost every page Mallory is presenting interesting data and posing even more interesting questions. And so we arrive at page 77, and one of the major questions about the passage-tomb builders is given consideration.

The giant passage-tomb of Knowth and one of its satellites. Huge effort was required to build these monuments.

Mallory says that in the Mesolithic, hunter-gatherers considered most material possessions as impediments to mobility. In the Neolithic, however, the emergence of agriculture led to many changes in the way we lived. Interestingly, fish was apparently "off the menu" as there was a major shift from a marine diet to a terrestrial one. We should not be altogether surprised by that, but it seems to have been a fairly dramatic change. The landscape changed too – there was significant cutting down of virgin forests for the purposes of agriculture and monument building. (This, by the way, is mentioned in mythology. But let's not go there right now, lest we scare the archaeologists off . . . and I am well aware that many archaeology students do actually read this blog!)

Most significantly, the Neolithic generally sees the evolution of the concept of:

SURPLUS, WEALTH and SOCIAL RANKING.

"Or," as Mallory puts it, "if you prefer":

WASTE, GREED and DISCONTENT.

And so, as we sowed the seeds of agriculture in the Boyne Valley and other parts of Ireland, introducing a new way of life to the island, we also sowed the seeds of a modern civilisation that, despite all its benefits, has seen us painfully divorced from cosmos and the natural world, such that we're trying to kill our planet – by overpopulating it, by stripping it bare, by choking it and by many other means, insidious and foul. But that's not the main point of this blog post – even if it is a most pressing matter pertaining to our very existence right now.

The point (or rather the question), in terms of the whole idea of social ranking and wealth and "discontent", is this: were the monuments built by a community of people that was unified in its beliefs, and content to contribute to this mammoth effort to enshrine its beliefs, and perhaps immortalise its  "moment in time" monumentally in stone?

Or, as the result of a hierarchy – a system of social ranking – was that community coerced, compelled or otherwise forced into these monumental labours against its wishes?

I'd like to tell you that Mallory gives us a definitive answer to that question. But, despite his obvious brilliance, he does not have enough evidence to place himself on either side of the fence (let's call it a Neolithic palisade) that divides these two options. There might, of course, be a third option – it's possible that some people did it because they wanted to and some were coerced, compelled or otherwise forced.

However, Mallory does lean a little bit towards one side of the Neolithic palisade when he says this, to offer a glimpse at the theory he might prefer:

... while mutual cooperation is always possible, large labour projects have often been seen to indicate the emergence of some form of social elite.

Personally, I've always leaned towards the "we're all in this together" idea – and see in the monuments of the Boyne a collective and cohesive effort representing the endeavours of a community that was largely working as one. What is my evidence for this supposition? I'm not sure that I could give you anything concrete. I see monuments large and small, apparently built to a system based on alignments and on cosmology, representing an effort to record and understand the passing of time, and cycles, but also representing a spirituality, whose complete depth and complexity we might never understand. It doesn't "feel" like a project that was undertaken or completed under duress. But that's just a hunch.

What material evidence would there be, if there had been an elite, and they had compelled the population to haul the giant stones up the banks from the Boyne, and to sail to Cooley and Wicklow and perhaps other areas in search of materials? How would we know one way or the other? I don't have an answer to this question. Perhaps some of the archaeologists do.

Bone fragments in a basin at Knowth (reconstruction).

One thing that's been scarcely discussed, if at all*, is how the bone fragments that were found in Newgrange, and Knowth, and Fourknocks, came to be in the disintegrated state in which they were found. There were burnt remains. These, we are told, were from corpses that were burned on a pyre, and their ashes retrieved after it cooled down, for placement in the passage-tombs. The unburnt bones, however, are small and fragmented. A key question is how did they get to this state? By what process was a person's remains stripped, the carcase defleshed, and the bones then broken, or otherwise made into fragments? And could this be relevant to the question of whether the monuments were built by choice or coercion? (ie, does the disintegrated state of the skeletal fragments indicate or suggest a community where there was violence?)

At Newgrange, there were 750 bone fragments that were "unidentifiable". We don't know whether they were from humans or animals. That's a lot of unaccounted-for bits of bones. In the appendices of Newgrange archaeologist Michael O'Kelly's book about his excavations there, T. P. Fraher of the Department of Anatomy at UCC says:

Apart from some complete hand and foot bones, all human specimens consisted of small fragments.

It's been virtually impossible to tell how many people were interred in the chambers of some of our most famous tombs. At Newgrange, there are fragments from five individuals - but that's all that can be said. Maybe the fragments are from many more individuals? At Knowth's eastern chamber, there were fragments found representing something between 150 and 200 individuals.

Were these all the remains of cherished members of that community of mound builders and astronomers and farmers, lovingly brought to the interiors of the monuments following some ancient ritual of disintegration? Or might some of these bone fragments represent something more sinister – such as ritualistic sacrifice or even cannibalism?

In my own research, I have reached tentative personal conclusions, but it's always healthy to consider other options and possibilities. We are a long way from a full understanding of the people of the Neolithic – such a thing is scarcely possible unless we find a way to travel back in time. All we can do is look at what's there and try to figure it out as much as possible. The truth is that we can scarcely understand ourselves, and our own incongruous and destructive aspects that push us towards the brink of self-annihilation.

I like to think that we can learn something about ourselves by looking into the past. It's possible that Newgrange can teach us enough about ourselves so that we can learn to change for the better . . .

Addendum: I've also been reading Robert Hensey's new book, 'First Light - The Origins of Newgrange' and he adds the following in relation to community effort:

A centralised authority would have been necessary for the gathering of materials and construction work to be accomplished, yet a certain amount of willing cooperation and community 'buy-in' must have been present for the project to be a success. (p.118)

* At least not in the books I've read about the archaeology of the Neolithic/Boyne Valley. But there may well be some solid archaeological research into this area that I'm not aware of.