Neolithic communities across Europe produced tools from the long bones of both animals and humans, and the analysis of worked human bone in Neolithic contexts has been a productive area of research in recent decades.

The deliberate selection of human bone as a tool-making material — in preference to or alongside animal bone — suggests that in at least some contexts, the use of human bone carried a specific significance related to the identity or power of the person whose remains were being used.

In the British Iron Age specifically, there is evidence from several sites of human bone being treated in ways that suggest it was curated and handled as a significant material rather than simply disposed of.

The presence of human bone fragments in contexts normally associated with animal bone — in middens and settlement debris — at some Iron Age sites has been interpreted as evidence for practices that involved the long-term circulation of human remains through the community rather than their immediate disposal in a formal burial setting.