Archaeologists find lamb bone and limpet offerings in coffin of Bronze Age woman on Orkney island

The Cist on the Foreshore at Lopness prior to excavation, Sanday, Orkney Lopness, Sanday, Orkney © ARO.

Saved from the sea on the coast of an Orkney island, a cist contains a woman who had grave goods placed over her feet

Bronze Age mourners left lamb bones and limpet offerings in the coffin of a crippled prehistoric woman after disturbing her grave, say archaeologists who believe the body buried on a Scottish island could have belonged to a loom worker or net fisher.

A “relatively large” number of animal bones and fragments of shells, lobsters, crabs, sea urchins and starfishes were discovered by experts in the Lopness cist burial on Sanday, where the middle-aged or elderly woman was interred between 1890 and 1520BC. Debris and pottery from a capping mound fell into the coffin when its lid collapsed.

“There does not appear to have been any attempt to repair the cist lid,” says Lorna Innes, an archaeologist investigating the burial which was saved from coastal erosion by the Orkney Archaeological Trust and Historic Scotland after being discovered in 2000. [...] Culture24  / Link 2


Read the full report from Archaeology Reports Online (opens in pdf).