Bronze Age Mummies Are A Real Puzzle

Left: can you spot this mummy's
tooth
close to
her hand?










Photo © Dr Mike Parker-Pearson.

Two mummies ( very old dead bodies, not mothers!) have been found on the island of South Uist in the Hebrides.

The mummies, one man and one woman, were found buried in the remains of a Bronze Age roundhouse and are about 3000 years old.

It's an amazing discovery, for many reasons. Not only is it a huge surprise to find mummies in Europe, they are very strange mummies.

Right:the puzzling Bronze Age man.



Photo © Dr Mike Parker-Pearson.

The male body isn't actually one body at all. It's like a human jigsaw puzzle, made up of bones from three different people.

The skull is from one man, the jawbone from another and the rest of the skeleton from yet another.

Dr Mike Parker-Pearson the leader of the archaeology team that found the mummies told us 'He is a kind of Frankenstein's Mummy'.

Left:Bronze Age roundhouses may have looked like this.


© BBC.

The female mummy was buried holding one of her own teeth in each of her hands. Why that was, nobody knows.

Also, both bodies had been mummified hundreds of years before they were buried in the roundhouse, again nobody knows why.

We can't be certain at the moment who the mummies were, why they were there or how they got there. One thing is for sure though - they are a mystery that archaeologists are very, very keen to solve.

Right:the burial may have looked something like this.


© BBC.

Who do you think these people might have been? Why do you think they were mummified? Send us your ideas and we'll publish the best ones on the site.

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