Digging up the Past: new light on Neolithic burial practices

Mary Baxter with one of the objects of her research.

The funeral practices of Neolithic people were more complicated than has been realised, according to research by Mary Baxter, a postgraduate researcher at the Department of Archaeology.

In an article published in British Archaeology, Ms Baxter reports that from around 6,500 to 4,000 years ago, Neolithic communities often returned to the previously disposed of rotting corpses and moved them from one burial place to another. Although it was already known that secondary burials took place, Ms Baxter's findings go against the accepted archaeological view, that taboos about rotting corpses would prevent reburial until only the bones remained.

After carrying out research at different sites in Britain, and anlysing the remains left behind, Ms Baxter concluded that the dead often received two or more separate mortuary treatments. An initial deposition of the body would be followed by the rearrangement and sometimes removal of bones as part of an extended funerary ritual. At Haddenham (Cambridgeshire) there was evidence of dismemberment of still-articulated human remains, and at Ascott under Wychwood (Oxfordshire) semi-decayed remains had been bound tightly into bundles before deposition within the tomb.

Ms Baxter commented, "These findings bring in to question traditional views about the taboos that surround death in different cultures."