Professor Tom Moore

So that's always hinted to us that women have, you know, can have status and have status.

I think the DNA evidence is really exciting because it's kind of, it's emphasising that that's, you know, there's clear evidence for that, you know, and the relatedness.

And also that it's not just Dorset, that it's probably happening in other parts of Britain.

So when we have the individuals that Tassus mentions, like Queen Cartamandia, we shouldn't be so surprised and that perhaps we only know about them because...

They came into contact with the Roman world, but there were others.

It's only really in Dorset and East Yorkshire that you have what we call an inhumation right, so the body going into the ground and in both areas, sometimes with grave goods, so things buried with people.

Of course, that's really useful because then you've got the bodies, you can associate with the grave goods, you can do things like DNA analysis, isotope analysis, and so on.

For much of Britain throughout much of the Iron Age, that's not what happens to the dead.

it's it's incredibly buried what happens the dead you do have inhumation burials in hill forts and farmsteads for instance but often just it's obviously clearly just a small proportion of the population who lived there what happened to the rest of the population is is is quite a complicated story we don't know but i mean you know if you dig any

Iron Age site really across Britain, you will often find fragments of human remains in ditches, in roundhouse, post holes and so on.

Bits of leg bones, bits of skull.

Well, I mean, maybe not quite that.

But I mean, there is an interesting question there because we are still sort of trying to establish what happened to the dead.

For a long time, we suspected there was excarnation.

So in other words...

placed on platforms or in trees and sort of, you know, left out to sort of rot and to be picked up by animals and birds and so on.

And then the remains went into archaeological features.

It's somewhat more complicated than that because there's been some wonderful studies that show that sometimes bodies went in the ground and then were dug up again and moved around.

And sometimes bodies were probably mummified.

They were probably kept above ground and then deposited.