In Iron Age Britain, human skulls appear in a range of contexts that suggest they were treated as significant objects and maintained within the social world of the living.

The Thames in particular has produced a large number of human skulls, predominantly from Iron Age and earlier periods, that appear to have been deposited deliberately in the river — a pattern suggesting that rivers served as a medium for communicating with, or disposing of the remains of, the dead in ways that would have been understood as symbolically meaningful.

At excavated Iron Age settlements, human skull fragments appear in contexts that suggest the skulls were present in the living areas of the community rather than exclusively in formal burial settings.

At sites like Danebury hillfort in Hampshire, human remains including cranial material appear in storage pits and other features associated with the settlement rather than being systematically removed to separate mortuary spaces.