Archaeologists Baffled By A 2,000-Year-Old Skeleton Found In Scotland With Its Brain Scooped Out And Its Bones Turned Into Tools

Skull Veneration and the Iron Age Dead

To understand the Loch Borralie skull evidence in its cultural context, it helps to know something about how human skulls were treated in Iron Age communities across Britain and Europe more broadly.

The skull is the most visually distinctive part of the human skeleton — the part that is most clearly and recognizably associated with the identity of a specific person.

In many cultural contexts across human history, the skull has been treated as a particularly significant form of human remains, one that maintains something of the identity or presence of the person it belonged to even after the flesh has gone and the rest of the skeleton has become difficult to identify as a specific individual.