Ancient Brits Honored Dead People With Great Keepsakes

Varieties

September 8th, 6:52am

Cairo- Hazem Badr

St. Andrews Cathedral Graveyard. Photographer: Alexander Massek/ EyeEm/Getty Images/EyeEm

A British research team unveiled that ancient Brits had their own special burial practice that differed from practices in other civilizations. In Vietnam, families burn cash, clothes, shoes, even luxury items, all made from paper to bid their loved ones well in the afterlife. In India, mourners carry bodies wrapped in colored cloths to the banks of the River Ganges where they are cremated on funeral pyres. Now, archaeologists have discovered that at the same time when Egyptians were entombing mummified pharaohs with gold and riches, people in Bronze Age Britain had their own special burial practices - and a penchant for crafting keepsakes out of bone. In the study, which was published in the latest issue of the journal Antiquity, two archaeologists from London's Francis Crick Institute and the Bristol University documented the discovery of people who have been found interred with the bones of people who had lived long before them. Archaeologists Thomas Booth and Joanna Brück wanted to work out who the remnant bones belonged to, and how long they had been kept before they were buried. After using radiocarbon dating, they found many of the partial remains were preserved and protected and had been buried a significant time after the person had died, as part of an honoring ritual. This new study reveals that the bones belonged to people who had lived around two generations before them - likely someone they knew in life, and not some distant mythical ancestor. "Among the most interesting cases documented in this study was one of a woman who was buried with two skulls and the limb bones of three other individuals that had died 60-170 years before her. The curated bones were presumed to have been retrieved from a ceremonial box of bones uncovered just a few meters away," said lead author Thomas Booth, from London's Francis Crick Institute. This suggests that the remains of the dead were viewed as powerful or significant by the Bronze Age Brits, that they were retained for funeral practices, and in some cases, even passed among communities.

from Asharq AL-awsat https://english.aawsat.com/home/article/2494916/ancient-brits-honored-dead-people-great-keepsakes