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In 1887, excavations on Bedfordshire’s Dunstable Downs revealed a poignant prehistoric scene. Within the remains of a Bronze Age bowl barrow, the skeletons of a young woman and a child lay face to face, their arms entwined as if in a protective embrace. Such a carefully curated grave must have been full of symbolic or emotional significance for the people who had laid this pair to rest. Now new light has been shed on the possible motivations behind this arrangement, following the discovery of a strikingly similar grave hundreds of miles away in Luxembourg.
The Bedfordshire burial was first documented by local antiquarian Worthington G Smith after work to level a damaged barrow revealed the presence of human remains. The monument had formed part of a dispersed cemetery, and while most of its neighbours had been heavily disturbed by looters as well as by agricultural activity, ‘Barrow 8’ still had secrets to reveal.
Within the mound a large central grave had been cut into the underlying chalk, with seven less substantial graves scattered around it. Although most had been rifled and their contents lost to scrutiny, one was more intact: that of the woman and child. They were accompanied by grave goods including pots, animal bones, a white pebble, and a handful of stone tools. There was also reportedly an arrowhead that was lost by the landowner before Smith saw it.
Rather more unexpected, however, was the presence of dozens of small stone spheres, each marked with a five-pointed star: fossilised sea urchins. Twelve were found arranged around the paired skeletons, but Smith writes that he recovered more than 200 in total from the wider area of the grave and the disturbed barrow material. It is not known why these items had been selected for inclusion alongside the more conventional grave goods, but fossils appear to have attracted attention throughout prehistory (and into more recent centuries; see box opposite).
Smith interpreted the double-burial as ‘Keltic’ (by which he meant Iron Age), but we now know that it dates to the early Bronze Age, a transformative time when the Beaker ‘cultural package’ crossed the Channel to bring dramatic technological changes and significant genetic turnover to Britain c.2500 BC (see CA 338). This movement also brought distinctive new burial traditions to these shores – and we can now understand the Bedfordshire grave in the context of this cultural shift and Continental connections, thanks to research that was recently published in Scientific Reports (see ‘Further reading’ below).
Key to these new insights was the discovery of another Beaker-period burial in Luxembourg, which was uncovered in 2000 during highway construction works at Altwies near the French border. Like the Bedfordshire burial, it contained the skeletons of a woman and a child, and these individuals had also been laid on their sides, facing each other, with the adult’s hand tucked beneath the child’s head. Strikingly, they were surrounded by a ring of stones, too, possibly fossilised shell. This aspect invites intriguing comparisons with the Bedfordshire pair, as Smith’s drawing shows them nestled within an oval of urchins. Given that only 12 were said to have been found around the skeletons themselves, however, the suspiciously even, thick line of fossils might reflect Smith’s desire for a decorative border to frame his drawing more than any archaeological reality. Other Bronze Age burials where nodules of flint and chalk have been carefully placed around bodies are known from sites in Yorkshire and Wessex, however.
Exploring connections
The striking similarities between both burials were noted during a recent wider project investigating Luxembourg’s prehistory, and a team was quickly put together to analyse the skeletal remains and associated objects from each, in order to investigate whether there were any other links between them.
Although over a century has passed since the Bedfordshire remains were excavated, the two skeletons were still well-preserved in the collections of The Culture Trust Luton, enabling the team (led by researchers from the universities of Mainz and Ferrara) to to carry out genetic analysis of both individuals, as well as the adult and child from Altwies. This revealed that, while the pairs were buried far apart, they all drew most of their ancestry from Steppe pastoralists who migrated from Eastern and Central Europe in the 3rd millennium BC. It was also possible to establish the biological relationships between each pairing, providing the first genetic evidence that Bell Beaker communities in north-western Europe buried children with their close relatives.
The Altwies pair, it was revealed, were mother and son (the child being around 3 years old), while the young woman (aged 18-25) and girl (c.6 years old) from Bedfordshire were paternal aunt and niece. Now that we know the individuals’ biological sex, interesting insights are provided by the way that they were arranged in their respective graves. In Beaker-period Continental Europe, the researchers note, women and girls were strictly laid to rest on their right side with their head pointing to the south, while men and boys were placed on their left side, with their head to the north (this rule seems to have been loosened by the time Beaker people reached Britain). In the mixed-sex burial from Altwies, however, alignment has defaulted to reflect the male child, not the adult woman, with both individuals lying with their head to the north. Might this reflect the existence of a patrilineal society at this time, the researchers wonder – something that might have also influenced the choice of a paternal aunt to accompany the Bedfordshire child?
In neither case was there any sign of what had caused the pair’s death. Although Smith darkly speculates on themes of human sacrifice, suggesting that the Bedfordshire child may have been buried alive with its deceased mother, the pair’s peaceful posture belies such a traumatic death – and the fact that Smith’s report forms part of a book that he titled Man, the Primeval Savage rather hints at prejudices about ‘primitive’ prehistoric practices. With no indication of violence on any of the skeletons, disease may be a more likely explanation.
Seeking meaning
The turn of the 3rd millennium BC marks a watershed in later prehistoric European burial practices, moving away from communal burials to individual graves. Exceptions continued to be made for adult–child pairings, however, and the team went on to study 131 more burials of this kind, from 88 sites, all dating to the 3rd and 2nd millennium BC, scattered across Eurasia.
It is thought that these graves might reflect the spread of burial practices linked to Steppe pastoralists and their descendants, perhaps hinting at evolving ideas of family identity or kinship. It could be that child burials became more archaeologically prominent at this time because children were becoming more culturally or socially important, the researchers suggest, with their pairing with an adult perhaps representing an individual or their community’s fertility or status, or links between or within social groups, perhaps even between the past and the present.
Where children are buried with people who are not their biological parents, could the exchange of foster children have helped to create or strengthen social/political networks? The aunt-niece pairing could represent the child’s primary care-giver in life, or the woman might have been chosen as a ‘substitute parent’ to ensure the girl’s safe passage into death.
Whatever their precise meaning, though, these rites seem to have been sufficiently formalised, and sufficiently important, to have been transmitted across the Channel with the Beaker migration. As the research paper concludes: ‘the body of a woman, lying as though sleeping, clasping a child in her arms, obviously had a specific meaning to early Bronze Age peoples, a meaning retained across thousands of miles and amongst many diverse and fluid contemporary funerary practices. Whatever it was, it represented something powerful and emotive.’
Reusing fossils in prehistory (and beyond)
Fossils were capturing the human (and hominid) imagination long before we understood that they represent the petrified remains of living organisms. While we don’t know whether they were appreciated for aesthetic qualities or held symbolic significance, they are thought to have been first used as grave goods in the Neolithic period (for example, at Whitehawk Camp causewayed enclosure near Brighton, where fossil sea urchins were placed in a woman’s grave c.1,000 years before the Dunstable Downs burial). As well as their use in Bronze Age burials like the Bedfordshire example, fossil urchins are also known from Iron Age cremations, and continue to appear in much more recent funerary contexts. At Barber’s Point, near Aldeburgh in Suffolk, the excavation of a 7th-century cemetery uncovered the grave of a woman who had been laid to rest with a box of eclectic objects at her feet, among them a fossilised sea urchin (see CA 323).
Fossils were not only collected for funerary purposes, however. Long before any of the burials discussed here, and thousands of years before Homo sapiens arrived on these shores, Palaeolithic fossil-enthusiasts were incorporating fossils into objects that were not buried with the dead, but treasured by the living. One of the most famous examples of these artefacts is a c.250,000-year-old handaxe from West Tofts in Norfolk. Its creator had carefully knapped their chosen piece of flint to shape the tool around a fossil shell (top right), surely reflecting a deliberate design choice. The tool’s pear-shaped outline places it in the Acheulean category of stone tools, which is associated with Homo erectus and Homo heidelbergensis, and today it is on permanent display at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge. Older still is another axe, this time from Swanscombe in Kent and today held by the World Museum in Liverpool (right). It was created c.400,000 years ago, and its wider end preserves a clear image of a fossil urchin.
Further reading: N Zedda et al. (2023) ‘Biological and substitute parents in Beaker period adult–child graves’, Scientific Reports 13, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-45612-3.
Images: National Museums Liverpool/Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Cambridge, 1916.82/Record 2
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