THE notion of mummies conjures, to most minds, images of ancient Egypt. The brightly painted body-swaddling and monumental, pyramidal tombs of that land are hard to cap as a funerary send-off. But others mummified their dead, too. And in 2005 a discovery on a remote Scottish island called Cladh Hallan suggested ancient Britons were among them.

The case that the two Cladh Hallan burials, which took place in the second millennium BC, were mummifications is not quite proven. Britain’s wet climate tends to reduce all remains to bones, even if the tissues had been painstakingly preserved by smoke or swaddling clothes, so the bodies found were not exactly in pristine condition. But even their bones contain clues. And members of the team that unearthed them have joined forces with Thomas Booth of the Natural History Museum, in London, to look at them in more detail. As a result, in a paper just published in Antiquity, they have been able to offer further proof that the Cladh Hallan remains were deliberately mummified. They also show, by examining other burials in the same way, that mummification was a widespread practice among late-Bronze Age Britons.

Dr Booth has spent a good deal of his professional career looking at Bronze Age British bones. What he sees in them routinely is something called bioerosion. Corpses quickly become the lunch, within and without, of teeming masses of bacteria. The interiors of their bones bear the tracks of this snacking: long, hollow tunnels beneath their surfaces. By contrast, when Dr Booth and his colleagues studied known mummies from northern Yemen and an Irish bog, they failed to find such tunnels. They had thus, they realised, unearthed a promising way of identifying mummified remains. And, crucially, both of the Cladh Hallan burials lacked such tunnels too.

That led to further sleuthing. When the team examined 34 other sets of Bronze-Age British remains, they found 16 of them had this “arrested bioerosion”. That suggests mummification was widespread in Bronze Age Britain, though British mummification techniques do not seem to have been as good as Egyptian ones were, for many of the corpses were partly bioeroded and had only odd limbs that had been correctly mummified.

The funerary practices of the ancient Britons did not stop there, though. DNA testing of some mummies showed that they were reconstructed from several corpses. What this means is anybody’s guess. Dr Booth hazards that mummies were kept among the living, for political and social purposes. If you were related to a landowner who died, for example, then you could stake a claim to the land by stating kinship. That is harder to do with only part of a dead landowner, so patching your relative up with bits and pieces from others might strengthen your claim. Alternatively, unburied mummies may have been thought of as channels through which the living could talk to the dead, or to the gods—much as saints' relics are venerated by some people today.

That is speculation. Dr Booth’s discoveries do, though, suggest that mummification was not just the preserve of the preserved in Egypt. And the team now have a simple means to discover just how widespread the practice was.