STONEHENGE: Bones of dead relatives turned into musical instruments

The discovery by University of Bristol archaeologists has revealed some strange ways in which the dead were commemorated 4,500 years ago.

Researchers used radiocarbon dating and X-ray scanning techniques on a number of objects including a thigh bone found with the burial of a man in Wilsford near the famous Wiltshire monument.

The artefact had been carefully carved and polished and was found with other items - including stone and bronze axes, a bone plate and a tusk.

Dr Thomas Booth carried out the radiocarbon dating work;

"Even in modern secular societies, human remains are seen as particularly powerful objects, and this seems to hold true for people of the Bronze Age. However, they treated and interacted with the dead in ways which are inconceivably macabre to us today."

Professor Joanna Brück says bones were often kept as keepsakes.

"Although fragments of human bone were included as grave goods with the dead, they were also kept in the homes of the living, buried under floors and even placed on display,"

"This suggests that Bronze Age people did not view human remains with the sense of horror or disgust that we might feel today."

A micro-CT scanner revealed that some bodies would be cremated before being 'split up' and some were exhumed after burial.

There is already evidence people living in Britain during the Bronze Age practiced a range of funerary rites, including primary burial, excarnation, cremation and mummification.

What this latest research reveals is that the dead were encountered not just in a funerary context, but that human remains were regularly kept and circulated amongst the living.