Hello and thank you for joining me for
this talk today on 'The Trouble with
Cuween; Human Remains from Neolithic
Orkney' my name is Rebecca Crozier and I
am an archaeologist at the University of
Aberdeen so what I'm going to do today
is take you through one very small
aspect of research that I've been
engaged with for the last quite a few
years I specialise in mortuary
practices and Neolithic Orkney so
looking at the Stone Age and how people
dealt with the dead essentially so
just to help situate you if you're not
too familiar with Orkney or exactly
where it is ...
so we are just off the northeast coast of mainland
Scotland in the beautiful archipelago of
Orkney and one of the most exciting
things about Orkney and if you
haven't ever managed to get there I do
strongly recommend that you go, when it
is safe to do so of course, but Orkney
has an incredibly rich archaeological
landscape it is absolutely stunning and
everywhere you look or in quite a few
places that you look you're almost
tripping over Neolithic architecture
it's really quite a thing and
I suppose that's one of the things that
drew me to doing a lot of research
in this part of the world so as I was
saying I'm just going to focus on one
small aspect of my own research and that
is looking at the mortuary record but
just to flag up a few key sites what
I've done is I've blown up the
archipelago here so you can get a better
look at it and we're really focusing on
the main land area in here but I've just
marked on some of the sites that
really have defined Orkney and the Neolithic I think and certainly led to
this being a world heritage site
so we have Skara Brae [pink dot] out here on the
west coast, Ring of Brodgar [blue dot]
right next to of course the very famous
Ness of Brodgar [green dot] and Maeshowe right next to it just here [red dot] and then from my
own research the site that I was
primarily concerned with is known as
Quanterness [yellow dot] which was excavated 1972 to 1974 by Colin Renfrew and
for anyone that isn't entirely familiar
the sort of structures that we're
talking about are divided into early
Neolithic and late Neolithic generally
were talking about a period from the mid
4th millennium to about 2000 BC and you
can see here this is what some of our
tomb structures [top] might look like inside
and this is the Stones of Stenness down
here [points to area just below green dot]
ok so my research was primarily investigating mortuary practices
and this involved me
looking at the human remains that came
from a number of sites from both the early
and later Neolithic time periods sites I
looked at as I just mentioned
Quanterness in particular and this is a
fantastic reconstruction that was
produced by Renfrew's team back in
the 70s although you can't actually see
Quanterness anymore it's under a
grass mound but you can get an indication
of what it might have looked like if you
could still walk around inside it today
I also took a look at Point of Cott [top left] this
is an early Neolithic site Point
of Cott is also gone after me saying all
the architecture is still there
Point of Cott is gone sadly and it was a
victim of coastal erosion but this meant
John Barbour got to excavate the entire
site in the late 80s early 90s
and then I also had a look at Pierowall Quarry and Quoyness
Quoyness is not on the mainland it's on a
different island but architecturally
and in the layout it is almost identical
to Quanterness although you can get a feel
here of how massive it is and these are
megalithic sites so megalithic big stone
monuments and they're absolutely
spectacular and this is one of the
things that probably draws a lot of us
to be quite fascinated with what
they are and what they might mean and
especially when you can see them all
over the landscape. Now for me we
talk about these structures as tombs
and the reason we talk about them as
tombs is because of course they have
human remains inside them now not all of
these structures have human remains but
a lot of them do and it should be
realise that some have more than others
so some of these tombs have literally
thousands of bones some of them a few
hundred some of them just a handful but
one of the big issues that we have is
the state of recovery that we come
across these remains in so this is what
we might like to think about and you'll
hear archaeologists and people writing
in the literature and talking in
documentaries about the numbers of
people that are found inside these tombs
and really this is an estimate
based on what we can actually identify
but the issue is that we might
imagine finding lovely whole skeletons
where we can quite clearly see so for
example here this is a site from
Southeast Asia with these beautiful
skeletons and this is a female and a
child but we can quite clearly see two
individuals we can tell a lot in terms
of age and sex and stature just
from their bones that we can see here
trying to do that is not straight
forward with the Orcadian structures
because rather than getting these lovely
skeletons we get this [images on left] and this is often described as disorder and chaos and
these two images come again from Renfrew's work at Quanterness
back in the 70s and you can see this is
very very different this is not
straightforward at all and for many
years archaeologists probably well
we shied away from dealing anymore
with the remains because it's very very
challenging it's a formidable amount of
bone so Quanterness for example has well
over ten thousand fragments of bone this
vista you might know it Tomb of the
Eagles has many many more and this is a
vast assemblage to try and deal with
particularly when it doesn't look lovely
like this very challenging indeed but we
have some new techniques now and we
are able to try and make some sense of
it and really that is what my work
has been concerned with and I've just
put another image in here for anyone
again who wants to sort of visualise
what these places look like this is
Wideford Hill [above] and you can see fantastic
stonework here this is actually I'm
approaching Wideford and looking right
over there over the Orcadian landscape
there so one of the big issues for
archaeologists is how do we make sense
of this disorder in chaos that we're
seeing inside the tombs what does it mean
what is it telling us about what's going
on here and there are a number of
interpretations that are
circulating in the literature and have
been circulating for quite some time
and really this is about
archaeologists trying to make sense of
what might appear to be the
senseless so one of the most popular
things is that of excarnation and
excarnation is hauled out quite often
and probably given a bit of a hard time
now because it has been discounted
for the the Orcadian remains well for
some of the Orcadian remains by the work
that I have done and also the work of
David Lawrence who looked at Tomb of the
Eagles so for anyone who's not too
sure what excarnation means this
basically means exposure of the body so
and you can see here [top left] this is a really
great reconstruction and you get the
idea where bodies might be laid out on a
platform and exposed to the elements it
might be raised up to keep them away
from animals and then over time the
whole thing decays and collapses down
the idea of excarnation is that bones
might be retrieved and then placed
somewhere else so we're talking about a
very complex mortuary practice and
something that involves different levels
of engagement with a corpse and a lot of
this interpretation was based on the
work of Chesterman who has been very
involved in the past he was an anatomist
and this is before we had so many
osteologists who were working in archaeology and Chesterman looked at the
fragmentation that he saw he was
involved with Quanterness he was involved
with Isbister and he's also involved with
one of the tombs from down south
as well but he suggested that this
fragmentation might be due to
excarnation and he drew on some other
lines of evidence he pointed to
weathering and potential burning and
developed this very complicated
mortuary process that might have led to
and explained the chaos that we see
inside the tombs and this makes a lot
of sense actually and for quite some
time no one really went back to
examine the bones themselves and this
led to other interpretations [middle image] so this is taken from
Stuart Riley's work where he talks
about movement of bodies around the
landscape and a number of authors talk
about this but this idea that bodies are
being distilled so this is really based
in the early Neolithic tombs and this is
based around the island of Rousay so
this is Midhowe here and this
is a reconstruction of it so this is an
Orkney-Cromarty tomb
and it's really fantastic very linear
but what he suggested is Midhowe was at
sea level on Rousay and you would have
had whole corpses placed in there and
then bodies get moved up the hill so
moving across and up the landscape and
they turn into heaps of bones and skulls
so no longer identifiable as individual
corpses but becoming more compact
and then when you reach the top of the
hill and so Yarso is the excellent
example and the body has been distilled
down to just the skull as a
representation almost and this
is fantastic I love this because you can
imagine people re-entering the tomb
and we know the tombs are very
accessible and engaging with the corpse
rearranging things and then this idea of
bodies being moved across the landscape
and in moving them across the landscape
they're transformed into something other
something more representative and we can
draw on concepts of liminal time and
sort of processes around death
and it's just a completely different way
of dealing with bodies then than we
might know today and what Riley did then
so this was all based on early Neolithic
tombs was he suggested that for the
later Neolithic this is really the
time period that the Quanterness tomb that
I really looked at is situated in and in
fact I think this is supposed
to be Quanterness he suggested that this
whole process that moves across the
landscape was compressed into the later
monuments and so in a way he's saying
that they're no longer moving them
around the landscape but the
structure of the tomb is holding
the mortuary process within its
confines anyway it's complicated and
it's a complicated mortuary process but
it's really interesting and I guess my
question was when I approached
all this was can we actually go back
to the osteology to the human
remains themselves and see any evidence
to support any of these concepts these interpretations
that have been generated and because we
have some new ways of looking at bones
since Chesterman did so back in
the 70s and so I use something called the
zonation method which I'm not going to
go into in huge detail here because that's
almost another lecture in itself but
essentially involves being able to
identify different not just the bones
themselves but which part of the bone
that you're looking at and so we have
basically a coding system for each bone
and this is just a sketch to give you an
idea so this is how we break up
the skull or the cranium and mandible this
might be how we look at the the femur
and this is all recorded and gives us a
completely different picture a much more
refined picture of which bones are and
are not present within the tomb and what
I was able to discern and so this is
some of the data from Quanterness and
this is very tiny you're not supposed to
be able to read it I don't advise you
to squint at this I can barely
read it myself but take it from me what
this is telling you is that every part
of the human body every bone that you
find in the human body is represented at
some level inside the tomb of Quanterness
and this is implying that whole bodies
enter a structure so I believe that
we have originally had bodies not
necessarily in this pose but this is
just to get you to think about whole
skeletons again they just don't look
like whole skeletons anymore now how
does this work exactly
so when we're trying to figure out
mortuary processes from these very
complex and challenging assemblages we
look at survival patterns of particular
bone animals so if we're thinking or
imagining a situation of what we might
call direct burial or
whole body going into a tomb then what
we want to find is the whole skeleton
represented inside the tomb now if
the body has been exposed or through a
process of excarnation as has been
suggested extensively for not
just for Orkney but for tombs of this
nature with these types of assemblages
then what we're really talking about is
a secondary burial process where
in the body has been exposed somewhere
other than inside this structure and the
larger bone so the more clearly visible
bones are retrieved later by ritual
specialists by members of the family
whoever the designated people are
they bring select portions of the body
back to the tomb if that is the case
then we would expect to see the bones
that I've circled here so the big stuff
the really recognisable stuff so the
skull the arms and the legs the smaller
bones tend to not make it okay they're
more delicate so they don't
survive as well outside and they're more
likely to be chewed by animals and we're
looking for a very specific we could
call it a signature we might talk about
a taphonomic signature so we're seeing
very specific bone representation
conversely if we're actually at the site
where bodies are exposed and then the
larger parts are taken away and where
what we would have left is all the
smaller bones so we might see a site
that has the small neck vertebrae the
hands and the feet there's a bone that
sits in your neck at the front called
the hyoid and that's a very very delicate
bone we would maybe expect to find
that and we certainly wouldn't expect to
see a hyoid bone if we're looking at the
middle scenario where we have a
secondary burial where bones have
been brought from somewhere else now
what we have at
Quanterness fits our first scenario every bone in the body is represented so this is a
really strong argument for whole bodies
being placed inside the tomb in
particular we do have the hyoid bone we
have several actually and we have lots
of fingers and toes in addition to the
long bones and also the crania there's
a few issues around how that is seen and
that's a whole other lecture but
it's all definitely in there and what
I've argued in my research to date is
that whole bodies went in and whatever
happens other things happen within the
tomb but everything happens within the
confines of the tomb so I was able to
demonstrate this idea of whole bodies
going into tombs rather than this idea
of excarnation for all the sites I
looked at apart from one and that is
Cuween and you can also see it spelled
as Kewing like this so I thought
it would be interesting to revisit
this particular site and have a little
bit of a look at it in more detail
for this talk today so Cuween is a Maeshowe
type tomb that means it's later
Neolithic and it's located on the
mainland on a hill in the parish of Firth
it was first explored in 1888 and during
that time three or four of the side
cells were explored by removing the roof
and going through it was excavated
later in 1901 1902 by Charleson and you
can see here so this is Cuween itself this
is standing actually on top of Cuween
and looking out this is directly
opposite Wideford Hill with I
showed you in that slide earlier well
you can see here this is the floor plan
so there's an entrance passage that you
come in it opens into a central
chamber to get into the entrance passage
you have to crawl along on your hands
and knees and this is actually it here
entering into the central chamber and
then from that central chamber there
side cells you have one two three four
and what's really interesting about
Cuween is that there is a second inner
side cell off this one here on the west
so this one here is completely hidden
and it's surrounded in this earthen
mound you can see here in
cross-section so you have this sort of
beehive effect or chimney effect going
on as the side cells and the main chamber
but to get between you have
to hunker right down and I have never
managed to get right into the inner one
I'm a little bit claustrophobic which
seems a bit crazy if you're a mortuary
specialist I don't like confined spaces
that is me inside Cuween I've been in here but I
can't go in there I just can't do it
I've tried twice but no I haven't
managed it yet anyway artifacts that
were originally found included a round
sandstone ball and a broken urn that was
apparently of ancient appearance and those
both came from the west cell which is the one with the
added secret chamber and
there's also a small portion
that was suggested by Charleson and may
be due to later secondary interments my
animal bones were also noted and in
terms of animal bones they talk about
cattle bones a small horse and birds but
Cuween is most famous for the remains of
24 dog skulls
you may have seen last
year an amazing facial reconstruction
but this time of one of the dogs so I've
put it here because I think that's
really great but this is what Cuween is
particularly famous for 24 dog skulls and this has
been likened to finds of sea eagles at
Isbister so Tomb of the Eagles and I have
heard 'Tomb of the Beagles' used before I
think it's quite fun however radio
carbon dating
of three of the 24 dogs has produced
dates that cluster in the middle of the
third millennium BC and so the dog
skulls are now thought to represent
secondary use of the tomb so they're not
thought to be contemporary with the
human remains that appear in here
and this is a similar situation for Tomb
of the Eagles as well
the eagle bones have also been dated
radiocarbon dated and found to be much
later than the human remains deposit but
this is still interesting and it still
speaks to and a number of scholars have
suggested this speaks to the evolving
use of these structures and it still
allows discussion around ideas of
totemism for these particular
structures we say tomb a lot but maybe
we should say structure this is just
some more images of inside Cuween to help
you see what these look like
absolutely spectacular stonework you
have to admit and this is as far as I
ever got that's the way into the inner
inner sanctum inner cell if you
like okay but in terms of human remains
what was found so Charleson the
original excavator observed up to eight
individuals this was based on the finds
of skulls however he said three of those
skulls crumbled away when touched and I
have marked the other five there just so
you can see where Charleson
said they were positioned this
crumbling away when touched is a
really important note actually because
it indicates that bone must have
suffered some level of decay in fact the
excavation reports for Cuween infer
greater volumes of bones in the tombs
than was actually recovered so this
means we have to be really careful about
how we think about the numbers of people
we say are actually in the tombs you
also you'll hear
archaeologists we talk about MNI or
minimum number of individuals and
sometimes I think we get a little
fixated on this number and we have to
remember that that is exactly what it
is it is a minimum number that we have
been able to identify it is not the actual
number that was definitely in that tomb
so we just need to be a little bit
cautious about how we use it and of
course some tombs might have held
actually much greater numbers than
others but the key thing here is
this decay and that there's probably
a lot more in here then than we have to
work with now the current assemblage is
composed of just seven bones two femur
or thigh bones and five crania when we say
crania we just were just mean the
skull without the jaw there's no
mandible present interestingly none
of the smaller bones of the human
skeleton are present and this
precludes the support for a hypothesis
of our whole body interment and if we
think back to our earlier slide for how
we might use skeletal representation to
talk about mortuary practices this
actually corresponds more to the profile
of secondary burial following
excarnation but again we have to be
careful because of issues of bone
preservation but I'll just show you so
those are the bones that we have we have
our femur and we have our cranium and
these two this is two of the crania
that I was able to have a look at and
there's not a huge amount you can see this
one [top] looks not in great condition
this is weathering
maybe some percolating water
going through the tomb has affected it
this one [bottom] probably in a different place hasn't been affected in the same way or
maybe this one was in there longer
but anyway is there any more that the
bones that we do have can tell us about
what's going on at Cuween we have
to be cautious because of the issues
around preservation but it does look
like there's some suggestion here that
we don't have the same situation as
we have in the other tombs where
whole body interment is much more clear
so this is Kewing Hill number two and I've
used the old spelling in this slide
this is cranium 2 and you're looking at
the superior at the top views you're
looking at the top of the head so the
eyes would be down here [bottom front] okay and this would be the back of the head
 
clearly there's some
substantial damage to the top
here and actually it's particularly to
the right side if you can see this
jaggedy line this is the sagittal
suture so this is the mid plane of
the head on closer inspection there's at
least three radiating fractures that we
can identify and also an apparent
attempt to stabilise so this is not
Neolithic okay but this is an attempt to
stabilize the fractures and stop
everything falling apart using metal
staples and this was probably done in
the 50s this isn't something that we
would do today in museums this is
old stuff but the point is that you do
have this radiating fracture here so we
can have a look at a little bit more
detail here so blunt force trauma at or
around the time of death is identified
by the presence of concentric or
radiating fractures in the immediate
vicinity of the defect and what I mean
defect I'm talking about this [jagged hole] okay the radiating fractures and large
perforation identified on this cranium
would indicate perimortem meaning
at or around the time of
death you can't really talk about the
cause of death because we don't
have soft tissue to work with but we
talk about a manner of death and we're
looking at blunt force trauma that
resulted in a substantial penetrating
injury and in fact you can almost see at
least two blows here potentially so that
if you can make it out there's a
radiating fracture here there's one
there and one at the back okay so this is
a substantial blow and this is quite
exciting we don't get to see a lot
of this type of thing in
the Orcadian tombs because of the
level of fragmentation that we come
across
and so what's amazing about this is that
this was never commented on in the
original reports which are extremely old
now but it wasn't even mentioned that
there was any damage it just
said there was nothing remarkable about
the crania and this is Kewing
Hill number four cranium as if one
wasn't enough here we have another large
puncture positioned on the superior or
the top of the head and this goes across
the midline so the left and right
sides of the skull this one is
slightly different to the one I just
showed you because it doesn't have
radiating fractures however there is
some crushing on the outer surface
ectocranial surface right next to the
edge of the fracture margin and when we
have a look on the interior and so this
image here [right] is the interior
 
we can see a small
portion of the vault okay so
this has been released and this is
classic perimortem trauma this is
evidence of this little looks like a crush mark on
the reverse side this part of
the vault has been released this is
caused by perimortem impact to the
ectocranial surface so the inside of the
head that's not completely penetrated
the area of the defect so the location
of this will cause an incomplete
bevel would therefore imply it was at the
periphery of the application of the main
force responsible for this penetrating
injury so we now have two of these so
what does this really mean quite often
and what we have here this is showing
you locations
that we would expect to see during
interpersonal violence with a
right-handed assailant face-to-face so
facing someone if you hit someone and
you're right-handed you're most likely
going to hit the left side of their head
back of the head injuries this
is taken from research that has
looked at where we tend to see the head
injuries for Neolithic remains in
particular so it's a
repetition of the location on the top of
the head this is quite intriguing and
might this injury let's talk about it as
an injury be administered as blows from
behind to the back of the head and if
that was the case because it's right on
the top we might think of the individual
might be kneeling and blunt force
trauma will create fractures around
the base so if someone is on their
knees execution-style if you want to
think about it like that and if you
imagine their head slightly forward and
someone lands a blow to the back of the
head it tends to create a fracture
around the base of the skull and that's
not what we're looking at with these
individuals although we don't have the
base of the skull to check to be fair
but it's also possible for
blows to be directed at the top of the
head if the victim is maintaining a
kneeling position so we might imagine
someone on their knees and somebody
standing over them another possibility
is that this could be some kind of
postmortem
opening of the skull in order to extract
a brain that's particularly grisly and I
think the position of the traumas that
we're looking at just to show you on
that diagram would have been in
comparison up here and I think the
position implies the blows to these
crania definitely came from above
although it's not impossible I think it
would be difficult to imagine how this
might be achieved if a person is no
longer alive on closer examination there
are no signs of any cut marks that could
be interpreted as defleshing or some
kind of mutilation or something that you
might expect to see if this is a result
of some kind of trophy taking and
warfare for example currently it's
impossible to decipher the specific
motivation of these very significant
injuries whether they're the result of
warfare execution or a funerary practice
shortly after death is quite unclear
however it's tentatively suggested based
on their consistent and superior
position that these injuries may have
been deliberately inflicted as part of a
possibly ritual execution that
might seem like quite a big leap
to make but I do think and if we
just have a look just going to finish up
here I'm going to leave you with ritual
execution I think the placement of these
injuries I think is very important and
we can do a little bit more research
into directionality so
where the person who caused the
injury might have been standing or
indeed what actually has been used to
inflict this type of injury but I do
think that if you have two crania
both with injuries in the same place
more or less in the same tomb from the
same time period that this is more than
simply
interpersonal violence or indeed warfare
this speaks to something more ritualized
the volume of material recognised as
having sustained trauma due to
interpersonal violence during the
British Neolithic so if we look at the
big picture this is actually gradually
increased and it's now recognised from
numerous sites and this is again because
there's been a lot more work going back
to archive material and
there's so much merit in going back to
the original materials once we have new
techniques and new information at our
fingertips of most relevance here
David Lawrence has also identified
several incidences of healed and
unhealed cranial trauma in the Isbister
assemblage
and he's written about those as being at
the side and frontal aspects and that
might be more consistent with
face-to-face combat but is that the case
here again I really do think that we're
looking at something much more
ritualized and we also have to ask
ourselves what this suggests about the
community's perception of these
individuals we think of the tombs let's
call them tombs in terms of collectivity
and communal burial space because of the
mingling of human remains and the volume
of human remains that we generally
speaking have and we suggest everyone is
treated the same way because of this
because there's no recognition of the individual but this
might not be the case there's an
indication here of differences in
treatment or if you want to
use the term of someone being singled
out and special in some way there's
something that differentiates them or is
it that the tomb is specific and
that these things are happening in
different tombs and
therefore even though architecturally
the tombs are similar and reflective
of each other that actually what happens
once you look at the detail of it is
different between the tombs so you
might say in Ireland it's the same but
it's different at this stage and just my
final statement the size of the
assemblage we just have seven bones
antiquarian disturbance so those guys
even before Charleson that were
in taking off the roof and the knowledge
that not all the bone present in
this tomb was recoverable hinders any
confident interpretation of secondary
burial practices but it certainly can't
hinder the very clear evidence we have
or potentially ritual trauma being
inflicted on particular people certainly
more research is needed.
Thanks so much
for listening.
Have a great day.
