Iron Age Scots may have scraped out a corpse’s brain

Scrape marks inside the skull of a woman buried at Loch Borralie in Scotland suggest that someone intentionally removed her brain after death, possibly as part of an Iron Age funeral practice. Researchers also report bone modifications and close family links t

On a Scottish coastline that today feels wind-carved and quiet, an Iron Age burial has started speaking with unsettling clarity. Inside the skull of a woman interred about 2. 000 years ago at Loch Borralie. researchers found scrape marks that appear too regular and too straight to have been caused by anything natural. The pattern has led at least some experts to suggest a practice: removing the brain after death.

The burial is part of a wider mystery. Human remains from Iron Age Britain—roughly 800 BC until the Roman invasion in AD 43—rarely survive well enough to answer many questions. What we do know is that some people were buried alongside maternal kin rather than spouses. Excavations at the Suddern Farm and Danebury Iron Age sites in southern England have indicated that bodies were sometimes exhumed after burial. In one case, a body was left exposed until the flesh was gone, before the skeleton was reburied.

At Loch Borralie. the story has been pieced together from an adult woman and a teenage boy buried in a low stone cairn. The two died sometime between about 50 BC and AD 70. When the remains were first excavated in 2000. they were later re-examined by Laura Castells Navarro at the University of York in the UK and her colleagues.

What caught the researchers’ attention first was not only the placement of the dead, but what they found inside the woman’s cranium. Castells Navarro and her team reported striations—scrape marks—on the inside of the skull. Castells Navarro says the marks suggest the brain was intentionally removed.

“The scrapings look too regular and too straight to be made by any natural agent. It is most likely that some kind of sharp implement was used to do it,” Castells Navarro said.

Adelle Bricking at Museum Wales, who was not involved in the research, said the evenness matters. “The evenness and the regularity of the marks is really interesting and does suggest manipulation,” Bricking said. She also pushed the idea further. “And why not brain removal?. If they’re intentionally mummifying people in other ways, then such evisceration is part of that.”.

Not everyone is ready to make the leap. Richard Madgwick at Cardiff University is less convinced that brain removal can be directly linked to the marks. “The marks certainly suggest some manipulation of the cranium, but whether we can link them to the brain removal, I don’t know,” Madgwick said.

The debate sits beside another set of observations, this time from the woman’s long bones. The team found that some of them—including the femur—tapered toward the end as if they had been whittled to a point. perhaps to make them into tools. Castells Navarro described the work as meticulous: “I think they got the long bones and broke them in half and then worked them to a taper. It’s beautifully smooth,” she said.

Madgwick offers a different interpretation of motive. He thinks the bones may have been used because they were already broken in a certain way. with their shape gradually changing as people handled them. He compared it to how some animal bones were used to make holes in leather. “But there must have been symbolism attached to the fact that it was human,” he said.

Whatever the tools were for, the burial itself still carries a remarkable sequence. After the modifications, the woman’s body was reassembled and placed in the cairn. Madgwick called the choice striking: “The fact that they put it back in the ground in anatomical order after the bones have been used. I find remarkable. and it perhaps hints that the identity of that individual was not entirely lost. ” he said.

The argument about what happened inside the skull also fits with a broader pattern seen elsewhere. Andrew Lamb at the University of Edinburgh said that post-mortem modification of bones is known across Britain and mainland Europe. He pointed to traditions in southern France and Bulgaria involving “rondelles. ” where sections of bone are cut out after death and then turned into amulets. “I don’t know of any other cases of the brain being removed. but in southern France and Bulgaria you do have the tradition of rondelles. where sections of the bone are cut out post-mortem and these are then turned into amulets. ” Lamb said.

Lamb’s framing and the Loch Borralie details come together around a difficult-to-ignore human theme: the boundary between the living and the dead wasn’t treated as final. Castells Navarro says the work sheds light on the continuing relationship and interaction between the living and the dead during the Iron Age.

Bricking sees grief in the handling. “Death isn’t the end, where they just bury people and leave them alone,” she said. “They’re exhuming them, selecting certain remains, working them, handling them and then finally placing them in a special place as their appropriate next step in their afterlife.”

The researchers also tested the closeness of the people in the cairn. They assessed DNA samples from the two individuals and compared them against existing data. The results revealed they were probably maternal second cousins. The woman and boy were also related to Iron Age individuals from Orkney—about 175 kilometres to the north-east—and from Applecross—about 225 kilometres to the south-west.

That genetic footprint lines up with other clues. Lamb pointed to archaeological finds of pottery that suggest a prehistoric maritime community across Shetland. Orkney. and the Western Isles of Scotland. He suggested these people likely used wooden-framed boats with animal hide stretched over them—something like an Irish currach or coracle—“Fit for rugged seafaring. but not the biggest of vessels.”.

In the end, the Loch Borralie burial isn’t just about what was done to a body. It’s about what people believed they were doing when they broke. scraped. reshaped. and then carefully returned a loved one into the ground. And for now. the question remains sharp: whether the scrape marks inside the skull truly mark the removal of a brain after death—or whether they reflect another kind of deliberate manipulation that only looks like something more.

Iron Age Britain Scotland archaeology Loch Borralie funerary practices brain removal cremation vs burial skull scrape marks DNA analysis maternal second cousins Orkney Applecross cairn burial bone modifications maritime community