Danebury Iron Age

Iron Age Britons may have removed the brains of the dead

A woman interred in Scotland 2000 years ago has peculiar scrape marks inside her skull, which suggest that removing the brain after death may have been a funeral tradition in Iron Age Britain. The funerary practices in Iron Age Britain – which ran from about 800 BC until the Roman invasion of Britain in AD 43 – and the Iron Age more generally are mysterious because human remains from that long ago rarely survive. We do know that some people from this time tended to be buried alongside their...