Professor Tom Moore

So what's interesting, there are some wonderful examples of bits of skull which have holes drilled in them.

And so people are, you know, hanging bits of bodies up.

So, I mean, it's really interesting because I think, you know, the attitudes towards the dead are probably much more varied, fluid.

I think, you know, you can sometimes think, oh, isn't that disrespectful?

But perhaps not.

You know, it's more about actually the dead being part of the community.

Yeah, I mean, the famous one is Lindow Man, obviously.

Again, the bog bodies perhaps are part of that sort of continuum, if you like.

The bog bodies are there and certainly treated in special ways.

Wet places almost certainly have significance in the Iron Age, but in a sense, the bog bodies are perhaps part of the continuum that we see in other forms, which are now skeletons, if you like, not preserved, but actually part of this way of treating the dead in different ways.

And one of the things that interests me is that that might also relate to what you did in life.

Did you die in battle?

Therefore, you get one treatment.

Perhaps you're interred, you're in an inhumation, perhaps somewhere on the settlement site.

You know, if you died in a different way, you get treated in a different way.

Certainly violence is part of Iron Age society.

We have individuals who have

sword cuts to the head.

You know, we were talking about Stannic earlier.

You go to Stannic, there's a wonderful example with a skull with a sword cut.