On the western side of South Uist, one of the long islands of Scotland's Outer Hebrides, the Atlantic has always been both neighbor and adversary. Wind drives shell sand across a low coastal plain, salt hangs in the air, and the land can shift within a single season. As fate would have it, that same blown sand, piling up over fields and abandoned buildings, sealed one of Britain's richest prehistoric settlements, ensuring that layer upon layer of occupation survived in the alkaline machair. At the settlement of Cladh Hallan, archaeologists found floors, walls, middens, tools, animal bones, and the burials of a community whose history spanned the 2nd and 1st millennia B.C.
The archaeologists who came to Cladh Hallan were not looking for mummies. They came for the settlement, an extraordinary run of prehistoric houses stacked one above another, but what they found under the floors turned an exceptional site into something genuinely strange. Beneath three Late Bronze Age roundhouses lay four human burials, seemingly containing two adults, an adolescent, and a small child. At first, the adult skeletons looked like ordinary prehistoric inhumations, tucked oddly close to the houses but otherwise unremarkable. However, closer analysis revealed that some of the bones had been centuries old by the time anyone put them in the ground, and the bodies were held together in ways a loose skeleton cannot. Furthermore, the skeletal remains of what appeared to be single people turned out not to be single people at all.
Headlines reached for an obvious label: "Frankenstein mummies." The comparison was easy to reach for since Mary Shelley's titular creature is stitched together from the dead, and the vivid nickname stuck. Of course, the nickname also gets the remains slightly wrong, as these were not careless heaps of bone muddled together by people who had lost track of whose skeleton was whose. The evidence points to preservation, curation, deliberate handling, and eventual burial.
