The Iron Age dead of Sutherland, and of northwest Scotland more broadly, are disproportionately visible in the archaeological record precisely because the landscape they lived in happens to support bone preservation better than most of the country they were part of.

This preservation bias is a persistent challenge for understanding Iron Age Britain as a whole.

The sites we know most about, from a skeletal perspective, may not be representative of Iron Age communities in general.

They are the sites where the evidence happened to survive — and survival was determined by geology and hydrology, not by the cultural significance of the practices those sites represent.

Sutherland’s Broch Builders and the Social World of the Iron Age North