Mummification was common in Bronze Age Britain

Ancient Britons may have mummified their dead during the Bronze Age, according to a new study that is the first to show that mummification may have been a wide-spread funerary practise in the UK.

Building on a previous study conducted at a single Bronze Age burial site in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, Tom Booth from University of Sheffield used microscopic analysis to compare the bacterial bioerosion of skeletons from various sites across the UK with the bones of the mummified bodies from Yemen and Ireland. The damp British climate is not favourable to organic materials and all prehistoric mummified bodies in <g data-gr-id="14">UK</g> will have lost their preserved tissue if buried outside of a preservative environment such as a bog, researchers said.

Using microscopic bone analysis archaeologists can determine whether a skeleton has been previously mummified even when it is buried in an environment that is not favourable to mummified remains, said Booth. “We know from previous research that bones from bodies that have decomposed naturally are usually severely degraded by putrefactive bacteria, whereas mummified bones demonstrate immaculate levels of histological preservation and are not affected by putrefactive bioerosion,” said Booth, who is now at the Department of Earth Sciences at 

Natural History Museum.