Mummification was common in Bronze Age Britain

Ancient Britons may have mummified their dead during the Bronze Age, according to a new study that is the first to show that mummification may have been a wide-spread funerary practise in the UK.
Building on a previous study conducted at a single Bronze Age burial site in the Outer Hebrides in Scotland, Tom Booth from University of Sheffield used microscopic analysis to compare the bacterial bioerosion of skeletons from various sites across the UK with the bones of the mummified bodies from Yemen and Ireland.
The damp British climate is not favourable to organic materials and all prehistoric mummified bodies in UK will have lost their preserved tissue if buried outside of a preservative environment such as a bog, researchers said.

Using microscopic bone analysis archaeologists can determine whether a skeleton has been previously mummified even when it is buried in an environment that is not favourable to mummified remains, said Booth.
"We know from previous research that bones from bodies that have decomposed naturally are usually severely degraded by putrefactive bacteria, whereas mummified bones demonstrate immaculate levels of histological preservation and are not affected by putrefactive bioerosion," said Booth, who is now at the Department of Earth Sciences at London's Natural History Museum.
Earlier studies have shown that mummified bones found in Scotland were not entirely consistent with mummified remains found elsewhere because there was not a complete absence of bacterial bioerosion.

However, armed with a new technique, the team was able to re-visit the remains and use microscopic analysis to test the relationship between bone bioerosion and the extent of soft tissue preservation in the Yemeni and Irish bone samples.

Their examinations showed that both the Yemeni and Irish mummies showed limited levels of bacterial bioerosion within the bone and therefore established that the skeletons found in the Outer Hebrides as well as other sites across Britain display levels of preservation that are consistent with mummification.
Researchers also found that Bronze Age Britons may have used a variety of techniques to mummify their dead.

"Our research shows that smoking over a fire and purposeful burial within a peat bog are among some of the techniques ancient Britons may have used to mummify their dead," said Booth.
"Other techniques could have included evisceration, in which organs were removed shortly after death," he said.
"The idea that British and potentially European Bronze Age communities invested resources in mummifying and curating a proportion of their dead fundamentally alters our perceptions of funerary ritual and belief in this period," Booth said.