Jigsaw Mummies!

          With this weeks theme of lecture being kinship, I focused on finding an article to do with kinship! Through my search, I came across a compelling article that caught my attention. The article was entitled “Scottish prehistoric mummies made from jigsaw of body parts” and was published on the BBC News website, under the science and environment section.

This is a picture of one of the mummies found at the Scotland site.

The introduction of the article says that there were 4 bodies that were discovered in 2001 on South Uist, Scotland. The grabber of the article talks about how DNA testing on these mummies gave away that the mummies were actually composed of body parts from various different people and arranged to look like on person. Reading further on in the article it’s discovered that the mummies hadn’t been buried right after they were preserved! Extra testing revealed that the bodies had been placed in bogs for approximately a year to complete the mummifying process. After being mummified, it appears that the bodies, or mummies now, were buried in a fetal position. Yet, these bodies that were places in fetal position were not entirely of the same individual! For example, one of the females they found was comprised of 3 different people and even had the skull of a male. These bodies were also found within the foundations of abnormal Bronze Age terraced roundhouses. However, after some dating tests, all the bodies would have died 300-500 years before the houses were built.

Tying the article into the theme of kinship, it was thought that these mummies were related. Although, Professor Mike Parker of Stanford University does say that “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.”

As intriguing as this article is though, it is also very apparent that this find still has a lot of research and interpretation to be done. That being said, I would like to see some more of the conclusions on this case once they are published!

To read the whole article and view the picture, you can go to this webpage:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14575729