In “Beside the Ocean of Time: a chronology of Neolithic #burial, #Monuments and houses in Orkney”, Seren Griffiths lists the carbon dates of human bones from 10 Orkney cairns. The cumulative data for these skeletal remains demonstrates that about 75% of the people lain in the cairns died roughly before 3000BC, the rest of them died later, mostly through the 3rd millennium BC. Similar findings are suggested by dating of #skeletons in Scotland and England, and it is likely that the fall in numbers of bodies in cairns is, as much as anything, because after a couple of hundred years of existence the cairns were in poor condition, and often collapsing, making them sometimes risky places to enter.
Personally, I could never believe that the purpose of cairns was for the storage of corpses. Clearly in later millennia they were regarded as suitable sites for depositing cremated remains and the like.
Later burials seem to be dug into the perifery of the monuments, or a later addition.
In the few examples of funerary monuments that I've seen it's only special sites like Sutton Hoo that are obviously built with the intention of burying bodies.
See more in the Orkney Riddle blog:- http://orkneyriddler.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-orkney-riddle.html
#Orkney #Neolithic ##prehistory #archaeology #cairns