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'UK's two oldest mummies made up from remains of many people'

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Press Trust of India London
Last Updated : Jan 20 2013 | 5:29 AM IST

The skeletons excavated in Cladh Hallan are said to be the first evidence that Britons preserved their dead using mummification but scientists believe they were made from body parts of several different people, the Daily Mail reported.

Cladh Hallan excavations were carried out between 1988 and 2002.

A study using the latest technology has suggested the remains are made up of six different people, who died several hundred years apart.

DNA tests on the remains carried out by the University of Manchester, show that the 'female burial', previously identified as such because of the pelvis of the skeleton, was in fact a composite.

It was made up of three different people, and some parts, such as the skull, were male.

Radiocarbon dating and stable isotope analysis showed that the male mummy was also a composite.

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The Cladh Hallan mummies had been carefully placed in the crouch burial position, a style of burial where the body is drawn up into the foetal position, commonly found in the Bronze Age.

Archaeologists had been puzzled by how the bodies were contorted into such tight positions.

Sheffield University Professor Mike Parker Pearson said the mummies had not been buried straight after preservation and are similar to those found in distant Peru in South America.

"These could be kinship components, they are putting lineages together, the mixing up of different people's body parts seems to be a deliberate act," he was quoted as saying by the paper.

As part of ancestral worship, the mummies probably would have been asked for spiritual advice to help the community make decisions.

Archaeologists found the mummies in the foundations of a row of unusual Bronze Age terraced roundhouses.

So far, three of them have been excavated.

  

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First Published: Sep 24 2012 | 1:15 PM IST

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