Saturday Matinee: What We Did Before

Summary

History Daily: Saturday Matinee — “What We Did Before”

Episode Date: June 13, 2026
Host: Olly Gee
Guest: Dr. Barry Molloy, Archaeologist
Theme: Burial, Death, and Mortuary Practices in the Bronze Age and Earlier

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Episode Overview

This episode explores the burial customs and mortuary practices of ancient societies, focusing particularly on findings from Bronze Age settlements in the Carpathian Basin of Central Europe (ca. 1500–1200 BCE). Host Olly Gee interviews archaeologist Barry Molloy about his team's discoveries of widespread human remains—scattered bones, skulls on spikes, fragmented skeletons—which reveal a much more complex, varied, and, to a modern mind, macabre relationship to the dead than traditional burial alone. Their conversation delves into methods of dealing with the dead before funeral homes, the social and psychological meanings of these practices, and what they tell us about both ancient and modern conceptions of death.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Discovery Background and Main Findings

• Location & Period: Late Bronze Age, Carpathian Basin (Central/Southeast Europe), ca. 1500–1200 BCE.
• Main Site: Massive fortified settlements, e.g., Kornesti/Kori—largest prehistoric site in Europe.
• Unexpected Remains: Human bones found “everywhere”—not in formal cemeteries but scattered throughout settlements, ditches, pits, and even houses.
  • “Every time we were sticking a spade into the ground on the settlements, we just kept finding human remains.”
    — Barry Molloy [04:13]

2. Variety in Burial and Mortuary Practices

• Not Just Burial: Multiple practices—complete burials, excarnation (exposure of dead to decompose in the open air), cremation, deliberate fragmentation, and display of skulls/bones.
• Excarnation Details:
  • Bodies left exposed (likely protected from animals), decomposed naturally.
  • Bones then collected and curated, sometimes displayed or reused.
  • Some skulls show evidence of having been pierced (possibly set on spikes)—parallels in Sweden and elsewhere.
  • “We are finding examples of bones that had been exposed straight after death...[which] leans into this burial practice we call excarnation.”
    — Barry Molloy [09:34]
• Deliberate Fragmentation: Skull vaults cracked—possibly to access the brain or as ritualized destruction.

3. Interpretations: Meaning, Use, and Social Attitudes

• Ancestor Worship vs. Disrespect: Bones could be venerated ancestral relics, mundane household objects, or symbols of disrespect (e.g., remains of enemies).
• Ongoing Relationship with the Dead: Ancestors kept close—in the home, buried beneath houses, or collectively remembered lineages.
  • “The place of the living, the place of the dead intersected; you had dead people all around you.”
    — Barry Molloy [21:21]
• Bones as Relics: Creating “good luck charms” or hero-relics, sometimes with little factual basis, but strong communal narrative significance.

4. How Modern Burial Evolved from Ancient Practices

• Transition: Modern “separation” of life and death (bodies in distant cemeteries, removed from daily life) contrasts with ancient practices.
  • Rural communities retain closer traditions (e.g., Irish “wake”).
    — [44:08]
• Reasons for Change: Urbanization, secularization, and changing beliefs about the afterlife widened the gap between the living and the dead.
• Speculation: Modern society’s emotional management and mourning practices compared to ancient ones.

5. Curiosity About the Uses of Human Bones

• Practicality: In affluent settlements, bones were usually not used for tools, but exceptions (e.g., combs from skull fragments) exist.
  • Example: Dog-chewed human femur found in house discard.
• Value & Currency?: While not true currency, bones or relics could have value rooted in their backstory and assigned significance.
• Selection of Bones: Skull and long bones most frequently collected/displayed (shoulder blades, ribs, vertebrae notably absent).
  • “They definitely had something of a fascination with the skull. And with long bones.”
    — Barry Molloy [35:20]

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Memorable Quotes & Moments

• On the Shock of Discovery:
  “Literally every single trench, we're finding human remains, often in small quantities...the fact that there's everywhere we go we find it means these are widespread throughout the settlement.”
  — Barry Molloy [08:13]
• On Ancestor Practices:
  “If you're using a part of this, it's not necessarily my great great grandmother, it can be an ancestor from this family lineage or from our community that I'm actually accessing.”
  — Barry Molloy [15:47]
• On Excarnation and Social Experience:
  “The division [between life and death] wasn’t there. The place of the living, the place of the dead intersected—the dead people all around you.”
  — Barry Molloy [21:21]
• On Material Value vs. Symbolic Power:
  “I think human remains, while they were material culture, they were still treated as being human in some sense. They didn't lose that human value.”
  — Barry Molloy [24:33]
• On How Archaeology's Blind Spots Change:
  “The concept of the bones being pulled apart and dismantled and separated was perhaps just simply not on people’s radar.”
  — Olly Gee [38:46]
• On Elites and Prosperity:
  “All your key markers of affluence from the prehistoric world—having access to lots of metal, access to precious metals, sustaining large herds, having large human labor forces. These are all kind of symbols of wealth and prosperity.”
  — Barry Molloy [40:54]
• On Modern Alienation from Death:
  “I don’t think I’ve ever seen a dead body in real life... Maybe it was a healthier way to be in ancient times.”
  — Olly Gee [42:03 & 21:10]

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Timestamps for Notable Segments

• [03:26] Introduction to Bronze Age mortuary practices and scene-setting
• [04:33-07:17] Major site discoveries and surprise at widespread bone occurrence
• [08:33-11:30] Condition, placement, and possible treatment of found remains; excarnation explained
• [12:41-14:04] Evidence for heads/skulls on spikes, public display at settlement boundaries
• [15:32-16:50] Discussion of ancestor cults versus individual memorialization
• [17:53-21:21] The possible uses and treat­ment of bones—respect, practicality, and domestic practices
• [24:33-25:44] Discussion on dog-chewed bones and the material vs. symbolic meaning of human remains
• [26:19-28:15] Mortuary rituals predating burial; Neanderthal and early human funeral practices
• [29:51-32:37] Global diversity in mortuary practices; bones as relics/objects
• [35:20-36:14] The prominence of the skull and long bones in ancient curation
• [42:03-45:32] Shift from intimate/mundane exposure to the dead toward modern separation
• [45:44-46:56] Genetics and ongoing research; what ancient DNA may reveal about family, taboo, and society

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Conclusion

By examining how ancient people kept, displayed, and repurposed bones, this episode challenges us to rethink the universality of “normal” burial and highlights spectacular variability in human attitudes toward death. Dr. Barry Molloy’s findings underscore both the complexity of ancient mortuary customs and the active relationships ancient societies maintained with their dead—a sharp contrast to modern Western distance from mortality. The episode closes with reflection on how further discoveries and genetic research may continue to change our perceptions of death, family, and the ancestors who made us.

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For Listeners:

If fascinated by strange, illuminating stories from the past, listeners are encouraged to follow “What We Did Before” for future explorations.

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End of Summary.

Transcript

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[Podcast Host Introduction]

Part of my fascination with history stems from the realization that we are them. What I mean here is that from the dawn of recorded history until now, not a lot of time has passed. Certainly not on an evolutionary scale. We're better off today, of course, because of better nutrition, sanitation and medicine, but we are fundamentally the same semi hairy apes we were back in the fourth millennium BCE when things first started getting written down. And that means if I were living in the past, I would be pretty much the same. I might be uncomfortable, unwell and illiterate, but hey, so is everyone else. I'd be no different from those around me. And that's where the fascination comes in. If I didn't have a smartphone, which I didn't for most of my life, what would I be doing for information or entertainment? Going backwards, I'd be watching television or going to a movie, or listening to the radio or reading a book or catching a play, or heading to the tavern or gossiping by the fire. I'd still be me, but my options would change. So how would I spend My time in 16:35? In 10? 35? In 35? How would things be different and how would they be the same? That's the premise of the podcast we're sharing today. What we did before in the episode you're about to hear, archaeologists find an ancient Bronze Age settlement and uncover loads of human bones. But they weren't found in just one place like a burial ground. They were everywhere, as if the people living then were collecting them. Is this what we did before funeral homes? I hope you enjoy. While you're listening, be sure to search for and follow what we did before. We put a link in the show notes to make it easy for you.

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[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Imagine returning home to your village after a busy day to be greeted by human skulls on pikes. You head home to see the femur of your great aunt lying on the floor and the skull of your grandma proudly displayed on your mantelpiece. It might sound macabre, but for some Bronze Age communities, this might have been a reality. You see, before burying our dead in the ground became the norm, the our ancient ancestors had many different ways of dealing with the deceased, and quite often they'd simply rip a dead body apart.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I always think if I lived in prehistory, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew what was happening, you know.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

That's Barry Molloy, an archaeologist who has just uncovered the most unexpected surprise at a Bronze Age site in Central Europe.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Every time we were sticking a spade into the ground on the settlements, we just kept finding human remains.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

I'm Olly Gee. And this is what we did before, where we explore the history of everyday life. And today Barry is here to discuss his incredible findings and what we did before burial. Barry Molloy, welcome to the podcast. Thank you for joining me.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Thank you very much for the invitation to join.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Well, I was so fascinated when I saw your recent discovery, your recent work, looking at what are quite surprising burial practices of ancient people, if you can call them burial practices at all, because they weren't exactly burying their dead. In fact, your paper is titled the Unburied Dead. Can you tell me about the research that you've been doing?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, I could give you a little bit of background, I suppose. First, we're looking at the Bronze Age in the Carpathian basin. So that's in Central Europe. Well, central to Southeast Europe. And we're looking at a period, roughly speaking, from 1500 to 1200 B.C. that's called the Late Bronze Age. And it's a period where people might be familiar with things like New Kingdom, Egypt, Tutankhamun the Trojan War, that kind of thing. So just a broadly location, time and space. We were interested really in what's happening in this really central part of Europe. It's a very well connected area. So what happens there is important. But earlier in the Bronze Age we had these tell settlements, this big, big complex, I suppose society, and it had collapsed sometime around 1600 BC and we were interested in, well, what's happening next in this area at this time of all these other societies coming to their height. And it's a really big globalized Bronze Age world. So we weren't investigating the settlements of the area and we found these huge fortified sites. And that was something quite unexpected. We didn't realize to find this like over 100 of these massive fortified sites and that includes one that was known previously, which is called Karnesti or Kori, the biggest bronze, the biggest prehistoric site in Europe. I think it's massive, massive fortified site.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

When you say fortified, how were they fortifying it?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

They were building ditches around the sites, often quite large ditches. They might be five, six meters across, they could be two, three, even four meters deep. And some of them then would have had walls like palisades, so wooden unearthed walls going around the inside. So they were quite keen on keeping what they had inside and keeping people wanting to take it on the outside.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Is it, is this surprising because we didn't necessarily know they were doing this wide scale in the Bronze Age, that this sort of complex architecture almost.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, I mean that was a surprise for us because we had known of Kornesh di Arkhoury, this massive site, and there's one or two others known. So these are kind of seen as these isolated phenomena. But then our research, looking at aerial imagery, then going down onto the ground, driving around, finding these sites on the ground, we, like I say we discovered over 100 of these sites over the course of maybe three or four years. So it went from knowing of one or two isolated sites to seeing this as a whole complex of these sites covering this whole landscape.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And so you were there looking at these incredible fortifications. Did you expect to find what you did in terms of the sort of ancient burial practices?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, that was the thing. Like we were, we are interested in learning about the lives of the people that lived in these sites. So we were looking at the mortuary archaeology. But then when we were digging these settlements, we just kept finding human remains. So we're digging the ditches, we find human remains, we dig pits, we find human remains. Even when a slightly later period going to about, you know, 900 BC, 800 BC, we're finding humans in complete burials, bits of burials in the remains of houses. So every time we were sticking a spade in the ground on the settlements, we were finding them. So, you know, the cemeteries. So we thought that's where they're putting the dead. But no, they're doing a lot more with the dead than we expected.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Kind of an archaeologist dream, in a way, to find something wherever you put your spade.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, yeah, it was. I mean, we've only dug the sites we're digging. We might have dug 0.01% of the site. And literally every single trench, we're finding human remains, often in small quantities. But it's. When we look at the size of these sites and the tiny bit we dug, the fact that there's everywhere we go we find it means these are widespread throughout the settlement.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

What condition are these human remains in when you do find them?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

They can be quite varied. We often find small fragments of them and they were broken up before being put in the ground. And we also find sometimes complete things, like we find occasionally complete skulls or large portions of a complete skulls. We find complete arm and leg bones, these kind of things in the ditches in our surrounding area. We do sometimes find complete burials. There's some in Hungary where they suspect people were bound and buried in the pit. We don't know if they were tied and killed and put in or buried alive. We don't really know. But we're finding, you know, just complete remains, disturbed remains and bits of remains on these settlements.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And so the fact that they were scattered and not all in one place, as you suggest, means that they weren't being buried in one particular space like we would today, like we would expect. So what was happening then? Why were they kind of littered about the place?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, it seems even then there was a couple of different reasons. And I can say it's not as clear as we'd like it to be. But what we did is a new method of histotyphonomy, which is my colleague Tom Booth over in the Crick Institute in London. He uses CT scans of bones, and from that he's able to say, was this bone exposed to the air for a long time before it was buried, or was this bone, you know, attached to a person or otherwise buried, buried in the ground very soon after death? And we are finding examples of bones that had been exposed straight after death. They're exposed for a period of time to the elements. And that leans into this burial practice we call excarnation. Where people are exposed and their bodies are allowed to decompose in the air, presumably on a platform or something. We don't get like animal. We don't get rodent gnaw marks like rats or mice or anything climbing aboard to start chewing at the flesh. So they're in a protected space, but their bodies were decomposing, it seems. Others seem to have been physically broken apart while still fresh. That's quite gooey, and maybe in our view, at least not how we normally expect the treatment of the dead to take place. But we had one example where the cranial vault had been cracked open with something like an axe. So we don't know if that was breaking the head apart to break it or was actually trying to access the brain. But a net effect is they were getting inside the skull, and that was very soon after death.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

So accessing the brain, we know that at least in sort of ancient Egypt, a lot of people thought the heart was this sort of control center of the body and not the brain. The brain was seen actually more as sort of a kind of useless organ in many ways. It's only in fairly recent times that we've had that perspective shifted. So it possible that they wanted the brain for something or that they were just trying to remove it so that they could make these skulls, you know, lighter and. And more decorative.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I'm afraid with the fragments we get, we just can't tell that we. We don't have the complete body. All that we have remaining is that fracture, that tiny, small fragment of the skull that tells us that they had, you know, accessed. They'd broken it and they'd accessed it. So, you know, we were between. Was it the brain that they were after or was deconstructing the skull that they were looking to do? I know we've one other case where we've got. Again, this was not what you expect when you're excavating. We found the frontal bone of a person. So basically from around here back to middle of the head, just this top part of the skull, but it had a hole in it. And you'd expect something like this might be from an injury. They might have been shot with an arrow or a sling or something. But then we noticed that the hole was actually from the inside of the skull, not from the outside. So this had been somehow pierced with a stake. Something had gone. Probably when it was a complete skull, it had gone through the base of the skull, now through the top of the skull. And we looked at examples from around Europe. There weren't many parallels, but we had some from Sweden, from a much earlier period, and they appeared to have been putting heads on spikes there. So it. We can't tell that, but it has the physical characteristics that would be like, you know, someone that put this on a spike.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yeah. So either putting a head on a spike of an enemy that you've sort of defeated, or doing it to sort of proudly display a deceased loved one is. Those are two possibilities, right?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

They could be, yeah. And I mean, the thing is, we find these in the ditches surrounding the sites. A lot of these remain. So you imagine these are large sites. They're. This one where we found this is 200 hectares in size, and we find these at the boundary. So that's kind of right. If you're entering into the site, you have to pass through these boundaries. You go through a causeway, like a little like a drawbridge, except it's built of earth. So you go through this causeway into the site, and that's where we're finding the human remains sometimes. So this instance of the head where it had been pierced, if that had been displayed, it was displayed as you're going into the site. So everybody coming in and leaving that would have seen it. So, yeah, part and parcel of your experience of visiting these places.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Wow, that's fascinating. I'm. I'm so sort of building up this mental image of it now. It kind of looks quite Gothic in a way. Tell me a little bit more about excarnation, because this seems like a strange practice to leave the body exposed to the air, to decompose like that outside of a grave. Why would that have been a practice by ancient people?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

That's a. Yeah, it's a challenging question. I mean, we don't have enough dead people in cemeteries. So you have this question in archaeology of what are they doing with the dead? You know, if we have cemeteries with a couple of tens of people spread over two, 300 years, that's not the living population. So the other people were going somewhere else. Something was happening with them. But at this time, we have cremation as a burial practice, and cremation in this period, they weren't taking what they will. I'm sure your viewers all know what cremation is, but basically, at this time, they put them on a wooden pyre and they had burned this for several hours. It would burn down, and then you've got the charred remains of the person there. The fragments tend to be quite large. You know, you can pick them up and see them. It's not like the modern day cremation, when you get the ashes back, this is kind of burnt bone. But they only went and retrieved some of these bones and put them into the urn. So it's kind of token, a token element of a person was often seen to be enough to represent the person. But it also means that the other bits of that person went somewhere else. They were left at the site, they were put in a river. But the alter thing is that bodies were broken apart in death and they were separated so they weren't treated as an integral human being. They didn't need every bit of you to represent you. So that fragmentation seems to then translate across into the bodies that weren't burned. So excarnation, the body's going to basically decompose into its parts and they can be dealt with separately then from decomposition rather than fire.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Do you think that's potentially because we. Well, we hadn't developed formal religion by this point. And so the body was seen more practically than spiritually like it is today.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I think we have this sense of the body and the individual and my colleague Joe Brooke in Dublin has done a lot of work on this. But this idea of that we see that when a person dies that their body goes into the ground and we remember that individual. That might be our like. I can go to a cemetery and find a gravestone that has my great great grandfather's name or great great grandmother's name on it. And I can, you know, think back to that as an individual. But Joe's work was suggesting that, you know, once you go one or two generations down the line, you've got this more generic ancestors. So their belief was that you joined the ancestors perhaps when you die. Now the extent to what that's part of a religious practice or religious beliefs, we don't know. But there's more this kind of generalized sense of ancestors. And we think that that's part of what's happening with the human remains, that when they're buried they can be broken apart. And you know, if you're using a part of this, it's not necessarily my great great grandmother, it can be an ancestor from this family lineage or from our community that I'm actually accessing.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Just a quick one. If you're enjoying this and you like weird stories from human history like this, do hit subscribe. It helps the channel out massively. Right back to Barry. So it sounds like there was no typical way of burying or dealing with the dead in ancient times. It doesn't seem to be a practice that was more common than others. Would you agree?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I would. I always think if I lived in prehistory, I'd like to be one of those lucky few who made it into a cemetery. You knew it was happening. You know, you would die and your body might be buried, you might be cremated. We're just seeing such a myriad ways of how the bodies were treated after death. And it's our biggest challenge is a lot of these don't leave archaeological traces. You know, we're so lucky to have accessed the material, to have understood that this was excarnation, because we found these few bones. And using this CT scanning method, we're able to define, yeah, excarnation is what explains this. But that's a rarity, and it's only recent years we've had that technology that can translate a little bit of a bone to telling us about the mortuary practices and how the body was dealt with before it was buried.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And so can we speculate a little bit about what these bones would have been used for, like day to day or like in. In the home, for instance? Like, why would they have been retrieving and collecting these bones other than just to represent the ancestors?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

My suspicion is they're doing it for a variety of reasons. I mean, just even down to disrespecting the dead. Like, you know, this could be the body. We often think of this in terms of the ancestors. You're getting the. You're retrieving the body of someone you care about. There can also be disturbing the graves of enemies, of enemy groups. It can be a very disrespectful treatment. So we can imagine when they're retrieving bones from burials and they're also. They're retrieving bones, excarnations, they might be also physically breaking bodies apart. So there's a lot of different pathways to how the body would have. Bits of the body would have ended up in a community. And we have no idea if that was all one thing. Like, there might have been. We've unsaid Vattin, where you had a bunch of skulls just outside of a house. So you might imagine in that context, these skulls possibly had been in the house for a period, and they might have been experienced, but then they might have, you know, come to an end of that role, an end to that function. And then, you know, they might have been treated not quite like garbage, but basically when that meaning got transformed, they weren't needed anymore. So they're placed outside the house. And these were found outside of a house in a rubbish Tip. So again, one reading is, oh, they didn't care about these people, that they're, you know, they were disrespecting them by putting into a rubbish tip. But it could also be that they just. The meaning had changed, they had served the purpose, they had been there for however many moons, whatever it might be, and after that they could be gotten rid of. We have other examples where we have human remains broken apart or complete crania placed into pits in the ground alongside animal bones that had been butchered. So again, is that disrespectful? Is it respectful? Are you putting somebody together with the remains of a feast or are you treating the body as basically discard, as rubbish? You know, this part of the body being put in these animal bones in a piss, it's hard to read. But when we bring it all together, we can see that there's clearly different pathways that human remains were experienced differently. Sometimes respectful, sometimes not on the same settlement.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yeah, I can, I can imagine there being a huge amount of respect to the human body through this practice. Because on the one hand, it is in the modern day, it sort of seems disrespectful if we would just start pulling apart a body and, and putting, you know, the arm bone in one house and, and, you know, their feet in another, for instance. But in ancient times, perhaps it was seen differently in that it was about keeping that person with you in some way rather than going to visit a grave. You've got a physical representation of them that is with you that you get to hold on to. And then perhaps, you know, like when your parents die and you have the job of clearing out their house, for instance, so that you can sell it. That's what happens. The next generation, their parents die and they say, oh, they've. They've hoarded so many human bones, we better discard them. And it's a process of elimination like that. But it starts, you can imagine it starts as this way of respecting the dead and keeping them close to you so that you don't, I suppose so that you never feel so far away from death. Because I think actually in the modern day now we do feel a little bit disconnected from death. And we've made that separation almost intentionally. Maybe it was a healthy way to be in ancient times.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

It was. We have this, as you say, this real division between death and life. Even in terms of the way we experience dead people. It's in a cemetery. It's in a very specific part, like we look at modern city or even a village. The cemetery is A part of the town. So you've got your living area where you're walking around experiencing your lived life. And if you want to engage with the dead, you go to this walled off place, this secluded place that's marked with very particular monuments. You know you're in a cemetery when you're in a cemetery, and you know you're not when you're not. I know, I know that might seem simple, but in these contexts, that division wasn't there, that the place of the living, the place of the dead intersected you, dead people all around you. And I mean, that can be the recent deceased. It could be like if you've experienced loss and you don't want to let that person go. I mean, we've intramural burials, people buried beneath houses, that kind of thing also happens where the people are kept close. But also I'm thinking even of you've got, in Iron Age Greece, you've got these hero cults where they actually went around plundering Bronze Age graves. That was their age of heroes. And they were looking for Odysseus and Agamemnon, these characters, and they're finding an ancient burial, they're taking a bone out of it. Kind of almost like the medieval Christian tradition. They're coming back with these relics saying, like, I have the bone of Achilles. I know this is going to bring great fortune to our family. So there's also that intergenerational gap that you go, we have this kind of sense of, like I said earlier, our great, great grandparent means something to us. We have no idea in these societies going back that many generations, you know, they're a common ancestor, they could be a hero. And bringing those relics from what they would have recognized as a previous time, it empowers those relics. It could be a good luck charm. So the human body is completely changed into material culture. Then it's like, you know, the skull is a lucky charm. That really seems weird to us. But in these times they were a very, very different, I suppose, moral sense of what the human body meant in part or in whole, a different sense

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

of grave robbing back then and more heroic than it might potentially be seen now. And also, I don't know whether it would have been whether the fact that generations came more quickly back in those times because people didn't live as long, whether that would have mattered as well to people wanting to preserve the memory of people because they simply weren't around in their lives for as long.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

That's true as well. Yeah, I mean, it's it's. It's very hard archaeologically, archaeologically to get that. That time span that the relics and remains of literally people you knew in your lifetime and you knew where they're buried. If you're retrieving those, it's the person you're retrieving. So having them close to you, having them within your settlement, it can relate to that kind of managing loss, managing the emotional experience of it.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

You obviously see. You know, ancient dice, for instance, were often made of bone. Not human bone, but made of bone. Could you imagine, given that their. Their presence in the home was so abundant, potentially these were being used as tools or some sort of, you know, cups, cutlery, you know, other more practical uses, because you sort of simply need to use everything that you could get your hands on in the Bronze Age.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, we're looking at quite prosperous societies here, so I don't think there would have been a needs must treatment to it. But I think human remains, while they were material culture, they were still treated as being human in some sense. They didn't lose that human value, so they didn't become kind of utilitarian parts of human culture. I know there's other examples, prehistory, of using human skull fragments to make combs, things like this, but again, I think that's really, really. That's transforming it, but it's retaining the human value. It's not just becoming a comb, it's becoming a comb made from a human skull fragment. Like in our case, we've got one settlement we excavated at Sakula, where we had a human femur and it was part of it. And the reason we only had a part of it was that a dog had been chewing on this. So this was within a domestic space. There was a dog sitting down, happily chewing away on some relative or some ancestor, whatever it might have been. But it was fairly recently dead person, so it would have been known to the people on the settlement. And yet the dog just sat there and chewed it and it was discarded along with animal bones at the same. In the same domestic area.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yeah.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Quite unexpected, you could say.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Deeper respect for recycling that they had. And do we. Do we see that we've had sort of mortuary practices for pretty much all of history. You know, obviously there would have. Well, I'm assuming there would have been a time where we simply just left the dead where they lay, especially if we were migrating. But for the span of at least Homo sapiens, have we got good evidence that we have been doing some sort of burial for dead ancestors?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Dead Relatives we do going back into the late Upper Paleolithic, so going back into 12,000 BC, something like this. From then onwards, we've got consistent evidence of burial practices. But it's also important to remember that burial ritual or mortuary ritual and burial aren't necessarily the same thing that we kind of equate. When you die, a physical space is created and your body's put into it and sealed and contained there. But just taking the example of excarnation, there's many other things could be like cave burials that could be river burials to so many things that how you dispose of the body is perhaps less important than the rituals that might have taken place around it. And we find it hard archaeologically to detect, you know, it going back deeper in time. But that doesn't mean that people weren't treating the human body in a ritual at death in a particular manner, because we have those examples from, like Shanidar Cave in Iraq of the Neanderthal burials. There's also in La Chapelle Auxin in France, the Neanderthal burials. We even have it in South Africa. At Rising Star Cave, you've got the Homo naledi, which is a. It's pre human, but kind of not. It's a hominid. So like us, but on a different evolutionary branch, it didn't kind of evolve into us. And they seem to have been bringing their dead into a cave. Whether they're burying them or not isn't clear. That's a bit of debate, or an area of quite a bit of debate at the moment. But the fact that they're bringing them into the cave, they're pulling them in through these narrow passages, they were removing them from places where they would be eaten by predators. So they're treating the dead in a particular way. So I think mortuary practices and dealing with that death, dealing with death as a transformational state, but still engaging with the body thereafter in some way is something that is really a deep part of the human. Human lineage.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yeah. And on the podcast recently, we actually tackled this new research from Tinshmouth Cave in Israel, where it suggests that Neanderthals and Homo sapiens may have collaborated in many respects on the evolution of their culture and their beliefs and potentially their burial practices as well. So it's possible you go back to Neanderthal burial, that Homo sapiens were sort of learning from what they were doing.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I mean, this is fully possible. I'm reminded of a. When I was an undergraduate in the last millennium, Undergraduate in the 1990s, there was a Lecture on Neanderthal society, shall we say, the speaker at the end, the question was asked, you know, would humans and Neanderthals perhaps have, you know, coalesced through mating? And the response at the time was, well, would you copulate with a gorilla? Which it was said in jest, but basically, at the time, the very idea of interbreeding between species, this is going back 30 years, that was outlandish. And then genetics came along and flipped that on its head. And then we see that they were interbreeding, and that means there was social and cultural interaction between them. So in terms of how beliefs evolved, I don't know. There's complexity there. But in terms of maybe the Neanderthals influencing and the Homo sapiens influencing, there was probably 10,000 years or more of these groups living in the same territories, interacting with each other. That's. That's a long time. So I don't know. I must say, I don't know the exact details of the site you're talking about, but it's not something these days that would surprise me to hear of this collaboration.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And do we have signs of other. You've talked about cave burials, river burials. Are there any other practices that humans have used throughout history that archaeology has been able to uncover, or maybe any particularly surprising ones?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, we seem to be infinitely creative with how we deal with the dead. When we. When we go back, when you look in global perspective, I mean, if the. As many people know, for example, you've got those. The child burials that. The Peruvian mummies, if these child burials in the caves high in the Andes, where they were kind of tightly bound together and placed into caves, we have throughout northwestern Europe and quite a few examples in Ireland of these bog bodies, where I suppose burial might be glorified by saying what happened to them? Because they were downright nasty. What happened to these people? They were people brought to the bogs and they were killed in myriad different ways. Often, yeah, one or two examples from Ireland, where you can see the variety of treatments, and they didn't die well, but they were placed into the bog afterwards. So that's. The use of the body is not how we consider burial. The body's been used in a ritual there, perhaps to mark a space, perhaps transform, to have a transformative effect on the landscape. We have osteoares, which is. It's still something we find in the Orthodox religion in Greece, Orthodox Christianity. You're buried for a period of time, your body's retrieved, it's cleaned, and then in many cases, it's placed into a communal pit, shall we say, or space, where there is just loads of other human remains. So the body is disaggregated and just put with others. And we have, like, really bizarre versions of that. You've got the Sedlit Church over in Czechia, where they've got the entire church inside, it's decorated with human remains. And it's. I mean, there's a chandelier is made from human bones, there's pillars are decorated with human bones. And again, that's because it seems macabre, but that's because the church itself is built on the stories. It's built on soil brought back from the Holy Land, as they have it in that religion. And so the church is there and everybody wanted to be in it. There wasn't enough space, so they did this with them. But, yeah, I think it's down to. For us, the body is inseparable. When you die, we believe it should be treated together as a holistic thing. But there's so many examples throughout world where the body will be disaggregated and used in very creative and different ways.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Is it possible that, especially given your recent research, bones could have been used as some form of currency? Or would you see, like, markings which would determine that more clearly if it was the. Was the case that these were used for trading or some other form of currency like that?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

We don't have anything that would necessarily say that they were used as currency. But again, there can be that sense of value in relics and value in specific things, because when you look at medieval times, saintly relics were actually traded. I mean, there are chips of the true cross. I mean, I'm sure there was enough chips of wood there to build a cathedral out of the amount of chips of the true cross circulating, but with human remains as well. Like, we've got St Valentine in Dublin here, where I live, the relics of St. Valentine in a church. But that was commonplace then, and I mentioned earlier that you had in Greece, searching for these elements of the heroes of the heroic age of the Bronze Age, and that these were. These were often people were told by the Delphi gargle, go find these. So in that sense, bones could have value, but I think it's the culturally embedded value that it was a bone of someone or something, rather than the bone itself having value intrinsically, because it is bone.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

How accurately could they have determined whether they really had unearthed Achilles heel, for instance, you know, a bone of an ancient hero? Obviously, even now we've got incredible ability to sort of, you know, map genetics, and really, you know, this new research that you've been doing as well, looking at how long it's been exposed to the elements, was a lot of it just story and legend in terms of what they unearthed and what they called it and what. What a society was willing to believe. That bone, who that bone belonged to?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, I think it's kind of you find what you want to find. So if you can't, if you have no evidence, you're finding exactly what it is, you make damn sure that the people around you believe that you did find it. So you come back with a nice creative story with the hardships, whatever you went through, and you might have been going, you know, 14 fields over and finding a grave that you knew of, just retrieving bones from it. But it's all about the story, I suppose, around them and the narrative that's built up in that same way. And like I say, I think the Christian relics in Europe are just a great example of that, where it's the story that matters. Like, even things like the Turin Shroud. I mean, it has a lineage passed through all of these hands. It moved around, and it's kind of. It became more convincing to some people that it was this religious relic. The more it had a storied history, the more it had been valued by others. So receiving it then became a prestigious thing. You had this thing, and I think it's similar with these human remains. But were they getting the actual bones of Achilles? I seriously doubt that they had that memory, that kind of. That information. Yeah.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And do we see that there were particular bones in the body which seemed to be collected more often than other bones?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, well, I mean, in our case, they definitely had something of a fascination with the skull. And with long bones, we don't tend to find shoulder blades or hips, you know, pelvis or scapulae. We don't find ribs. You don't find vertebrae from the spine. They're not commonly found when they're redepositing bones. We even have one ditch at an Iron Age site where they have a whole segment of this ditch just full of human bones. But it's all long bones laid out neatly. And then the skulls are placed in one part altogether, but they were focused on these. And I don't know, you could get creative in trying to understand why. I mean, you have the thinking part, you have the parts that move, the parts of experience, or you're shaking hands with somebody. But that's just me wildly speculating, because I'm sure that they had many, many different reasons, but it is these bigger bones that tend to be the focus of attention. Yeah.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

You can sort of imagine them using them as clubs for sort of gladiator style battles. Maybe that's why they collected the long ones. There's loads of reasons why it could have happened.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah. We don't get. We get them both complete and broken. And when they're broken, a lot of the time they seem to have been broken in what we call the perimortem stage. They're broken while they were still a bit gooey. They weren't like dried old bones that are getting and breaking. So even in cases, when they dig up bones from older burials, they're ones we often find intact. It's the more recently deceased ones. It's only a couple of cases, but they seem to have been green basically. There's the stage very soon after death when the bones are broken.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

You mentioned that this society where you unearthed all of these bones being sort of scattered, almost like litter, was quite affluent. Do we expect that if you were to do more research in other affluent Bronze Age sites and settlements, we might find the same or was this quite a unique location from what you're understanding?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I'm convinced that we would, yeah. I mean it's, I mentioned that very early about my colleague Jo Brooke doing work like this over in England and she, she was finding burials that when they're originally excavated, people kind of count it as poorly recorded or a mistake in the excavation. You know, you've got two skulls from this burial. It's only one body and two skulls. What have you done? And so she was able to go back and look at the records and going, no, there was additional elements in this burial. Somebody had placed part of another person into this burial. So, you know, in Britain, we know in Ireland they were doing this. We know in Czechia they're doing really macabre things with individuals. There you have a site called Velim, which is all the ditch around the site is full of complete and disturbed human remains. So in Hungary they've got again, lots and lots of human remains on settlements. Sometimes you'll have burials and pits where you've got most of the person, but then you know, the right leg and the right arm might be missing. So it's, it is a wider spread phenomenon. But I think part of it is where are people looking when they were digging? It's only in recent years, maybe 20, 30 years, that people have systematically retained animal bones when they're digging. And then you Know these restudied later. And that's where we find often the human bones. Because when you're digging, you're going through volumes of soil. It's a bone, it's a bone, it's a bone. You're not identifying that on the ground. So if you haven't been keeping the animal bones, you almost certainly knew it was a complete burial. You weren't going to find and retain the human bones.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Okay. Yeah. Because I guess the concept of the bones being pulled apart and dismantled and separated was perhaps just simply not on people's radar.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

I think that's exactly it. Yeah. So I suspect if we start looking more, we're definitely going to start finding a lot more. I mean, burials within the settlement is commonplace from the Neolithic onwards, but they are kind of formal burials where they dig a pit and they place the person like beneath the ground. But we're looking at these, what you might call more anomalous burials, where they're not necessarily buried in a specific grave course, that they're put into pits, they're putting the bits of house there, they're put into ditches, they're already half filled with rubbish. So they're not kind of creating a mortuary space. That. That's quite different. But again, it's. It's. When we start looking, I think we're going to start finding it more frequently. And I've probably done some colleagues disservice who are looking at this going, but we found it on our settlement. So I'm sure that there is cases out there already that they haven't come to my attention. But I know it's. It's not going to be a unique thing that we found.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And when you say this site was sort of affluent, what does that mean in the Bronze Age? Because obviously our idea of affluence today is a bit different. Yeah. So how can you tell it was a site where people were. Well, had abundance.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Yeah, that's a very good question. I mean, we were for a long time in archaeology quite obsessed with finding elites and digging elite burials and these kind of things. Or for digging a settlement, trying to find the biggest building that might be the place of the king, something like this. It's only more recent years that we've been kind of looking more broadly at how settlements fit together and how they were built and how communities kind of evolved within them. So in our case, we're looking at, like at Koreshti, you've got. What's it. That's a huge site, as I mentioned. That's like I think 35km of ditches at our sites. You know, a small site might be one or two kilometers of ditches, bigger sites, maybe, you know, seven, eight, nine kilometers of ditches. That's a huge investment. So they're actually, they're, they're kind of showing the affluence through building these big places. But we think within them that they're also using, these contain their herds. And that gives us a sense of them having a lot of animals. So animals was a form of wealth, but it's not one we can, we can identify so easily archaeologically, but also in the traditional sense. We've got just schedules of bronze. They had a lot of metal, so they were making, you know, dress pins, ornaments, razors, swords, spears, shields, armor, cooking devices, everything out of bronze. It was, you're tripping over bronze. So they, no shortage of metals. And then like we even found recently, my colleagues, not me, my colleagues found, on a gas pipeline, they found a little pot just randomly in a field and just full of these little gold hair ornaments. So there's quite a bit of gold in circulation as well. We find that a couple of settlements like Santana in Romania, which is close to us, and again there, they found plenty of gold in that settlement. So all your key markers of affluence from the prehistoric world, having access to lots of metal, access to precious metals, sustaining large herds, having large human labor forces. These are all kind of symbols of wealth and prosperity.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And I know this is. Requires a bit of speculation as, as I've made you speculate quite a bit in this episode. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I do. I do wonder if you have a, a view on why we deal with the dead in the way that we do in the modern age, if in history we did treat them almost as sort of objects that we could take apart and put in our home. I know we've been through various iterations of burial. You know, obviously in ancient Egypt, those are very well known. But today, I, I don't think I've ever seen a dead body in real life. I, I don't recall having ever seen one. Actually. I'm not even sure I've been to a funeral with an open casket. So do we, do we see in archaeology when this transformation happened? And, and have you got some ideas

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

of why it's hard to see of when it happened? I mean, thinking in terms of things like globalization, let's, or blame globalization, but basically, as our cities have developed, I mean, things have become so much less personal. Like we've, we've millions of people living together and cemeteries are a small, tiny, isolated part of these big communities. But when you go to rural communities, you still have a much closer link between the cemetery and, and, and people living around it. And I think it's that break in larger settlements that's kind of broken tradition. Because in Ireland here we have this thing called the wake up. When somebody dies, you don't leave the dead body alone on the first night of death. So friends, relative, family will spend time with the body all night. They're not left in isolation. So you do encounter dead bodies. I've encountered my grandfather, my grand aunts spending time with them the night that they're dead. So we had that relation. Obviously, this is the complete integral body. We're not doing any Bronze Age things to our relatives, but it's that gap between death and life was narrower that we'd experienced a dead body. So you've got that sense of the timing of letting the person go. It's not they're dead and they're putting a coffin and they're removed from you. Yeah, you've got that transitional period. I think that's quite an important part of the mourning process.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yes.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

But I think with the way things have gone, you know, the family is often removed now from the burial process. If somebody dies, you're going to call. I know this seems I'm speaking very much about northwestern Europe when I talk about this. I'm really speaking about my own experiences. So you're going to call an undertaker and you've got somebody from outside the family is going to take the body, remove it and deal with all of the burial practices, preparing the body for burial, actually physically closing the coffin, all these tangible tactile things that a person might get to say goodbye to the person and experience them. We're cut off from that now. But I think it's also through the volume that's a strange thing to say, but the volume of people again, in larger cities and towns, the process has to be streamlined to actually manage to deal with this. It's when we look to our rural communities, we can still see these surviving ideas.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Yeah. I do wonder if they mourned better than in ancient times, if they did grieve better. In a way, I think that there's

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

more space for that. Yeah, but it's even that the secularization, like how many people are religious now. Do we believe in an afterlife or do we believe when somebody's dead that that's then gone? So I suppose in some ways in other societies when you're expecting that person is going on a journey, their soul goes on a journey, you're going to engage with the body differently. I think that makes, makes an important contribution to how we deal with things differently now.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

And have you got any other ongoing work or anything that you're, you're planning that's really exciting at the moment or, or even sort of not in the field of burial? Anything that you'd love, love to share?

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, I'm, I'm stuck with human remains for a period of time in the future because we're doing anal of the genetics of these people. So over the last 20 years, especially over the last 10 years, we've been able to retrieve genetic data from ancient people. So because of that, we're able to look at things like how families are made up, we're able to look at things like migration, how people were moving, and broader stories about how societies were structured and how different groups of people experienced each other in the landscape. So that's what we're working on now. We've got preliminary findings. There's some quite exciting things coming out of that in terms of sometimes people showing up where you weren't expecting people from a certain background to show up. You have other cases of. I'm speaking of, my colleagues work in Crete where they've basically discovered that things like first cousin marriage was quite common, things that we count as a social taboo. So genetics has a huge amount to tell us and we're at the. Well midway through that journey. So that, that's. I think some of our future publications quite soon will be on the story that, that can tell us about these same societies.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

Amazing. Well, it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you, Barry Molloy. Thank you for joining. What we did before.

[Barry Molloy (Archaeologist)]

Well, thank you very much for the invitation and it was great chatting with you.

[Olly Gee (Podcast Host)]

A massive thank you to Barry Molloy. I really hope you enjoyed this conversation. What we did before is independently made, so if you'd like to support us and help me make more episodes like this, there's a link in the description. Your support is greatly appreciated. I'm Molly Gee and I will see you next time.