SANQUHAR, SCOTLAND—BBC News reports that the cremains of at least eight people were found in five urns buried in a Bronze Age barrow in southern Scotland. Thomas Muir of Guard Archaeology and his colleagues were investigating the site before the construction of a wind farm when they unearthed the burial mound, which has been dated to between 1439 and 1287 B.C. He suggests that the deceased may have come from the same family or group, and that their deaths may have been the result of a famine or another sort of catastrophe. “The urns were deposited at the same time as they were packed tightly within the pit and adhered to the same fifteenth to thirteenth century B.C. date range,” he said. At another Bronze Age site in this region, Muir explained, bodies were exposed before they were interred in a burial site reused by the community over a long period of time. Read the original scholarly article about this research in Archaeology Reports Online. For more on Bronze Age Britain, go to "Bronze Age Beads Go Abroad."
