mailidhonn:

mailidhonn:

it’s a real trip that Europeans are so snotty about perceived ‘weirdness’ in other cultures given that their own ancestors did some really weird shit. I mean in Scotland alone aside from the Ballachulish Goddess there’s the Cladh Hallan skeletons, all those vitrified forts (which we literally still haven’t a clue whether the forts were burnt by accident or on purpose and either way we still haven’t managed to even recreate anything to help explain it), the weird association of specific Orkney tombs with specific animals, Maes Howe and it’s incredible mathematical dimensions not to mention the frankly bizarre number of stone circles literally EVERYWHERE across the entirety of the nation.

that’s not even thinking about the stuff relating to head hunting, votive offerings thrown into bogs and lakes across northern europe and, of course, the triple death bog bodies

to clarify: what makes the cladh hallan skeletons weird is that they’re actually bog bodies.

basically after they were excavated and sent off for analysis someone decided to look at the cross section of the skeletons. and when they did that they found out that there was very distinct evidence of them having been left in a bog to pickle for a good while (at the very least decades, probably more than a hundred or so years if I recall). they’d then been taken out of the bog and at some point reburied in normal soils. But before they’d been reburied, the bodies had been taken apart or had fallen apart. So now when we look at them, we don’t see a skeleton of a man. we see a skeleton that has the skull, mandible and body from three different men that died at different points between 1500 BC and 1260BC. Three men from three different centuries were incorporated into one.