Cladh Hallan Round Houses

Nearest town:
Uig (78km ENE)
OS reference:
NF7322
OS sheet:
31
Latitude:
57° 10' 18.98 N
Longitude:
7° 24' 42.21 W
Added to TMA by

Images

Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by drewbhoy

Well constructed, its a safe bet most of the mounds have something in them.

Image credit: srew/A/B
drewbhoy
drewbhoy Sep 6, 2023
Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by drewbhoy

If you walk north west from the three roundhouses you’ll see this.

Image credit: drew/A/B
drewbhoy
drewbhoy Sep 6, 2023
Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by drewbhoy

Interesting bowl type feature, to me at least, at the entrance of the 2nd roundhouse.

Image credit: drew/A/B
drewbhoy
drewbhoy Sep 6, 2023
Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by 1speed

Dismembered interpretation boards! Visited 16 Aug 12ce.

Image credit: Tony Morley
1speed
1speed Aug 20, 2012
Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by 1speed

The central house viewed from the E. Visited 16 Aug 12ce.

Image credit: Tony Morley
1speed
1speed Aug 20, 2012
Image of Cladh Hallan Round Houses (Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork) by 1speed

The central house, with the southernmost barely visible to the left of shot. Visited 16 Aug 12ce.

Image credit: Tony Morley
1speed
1speed Aug 20, 2012

Articles

Cracking the puzzle of the Cladh Hallan Bodies

This is a YouTube video of Kerri Brown explaining about recent DNA sampling of the Cladh Hallan burial.

Kammer
Kammer Sep 23, 2011
Cladh Hallan Round Houses

Prehistoric mummy puzzle

baza
baza Jan 22, 2013

From Planet Earth Online:

Mummified bodies made of chopped up people? It’s not a legend from ancient Egypt but a find from the Outer Hebrides. Tamera Jones finds out how the latest forensic techniques were applied to the mystery of Britain’s first prehistoric mummies.

When Professor Mike Parker Pearson from the University of Sheffield started excavating the Bronze Age Cladh Hallan settlement on South Uist, one of the first things his team found was a row of three roundhouses. Radio-carbon dating showed they were built around 1100 BC.

Further digging revealed several burials directly under the houses. Not so unusual in itself, but the archaeologists were surprised by the contorted and scrunched-up positions of the skeletons, which looked similar to mummy bundles found in Peru.

‘We also noticed that the male skeleton had a full set of teeth in his lower jaw, but the upper set was completely missing,’ says Pearson. ‘Our first thought was that this was some kind of Bronze Age torture victim.‘

But forensic pathology showed the two jaws didn’t match at all. Several months of painstaking analysis revealed that in fact the man’s skull, mandible and torso came from three different people.

‘It looked like these individuals had been cut up and put back together to look like one person,’ says Pearson.

Then the mystery deepened even further. When the bodies were dated they turned out to be several hundred years older than the houses, which meant they had been stored for several generations before they were buried.

The position of the bones in both adult skeletons suggested they had still been held together by soft tissue when they were buried, so they had been stored with particular care.

Pearson and biomedical archaeologist Professor Terry Brown from the University of Manchester, took the remains to NERC’s Isotope Geosciences Laboratory where scientists used a range of techniques to work out where the bodies might have been kept. These included the rather grisly mercury intrusion porosimetry, which shows how far gut bacteria has eaten into the surrounding bones after death. In this case, not very far; decay had started in the male’s torso but then something had stopped it, and there was no sign of decay in the female corpse at all.

Other techniques showed Pearson and his colleagues that the surfaces of the bones had become demineralised, something that happens in an acidic environment. All the forensic evidence suggested that the bodies had been preserved in a peat bog for several months before being taken out and dried. They must then have been stored above ground for hundreds of years before being merged with other mummified individuals and finally buried.

‘At the time this was the first ever evidence of mummification outside of South America and Egypt,’ says Pearson. ‘Before this, mummification in the British Bronze Age was unheard of.‘

Most recently, DNA from the female’s skull, jaw, arm and thigh bones has shown that, just like the male, the woman’s skeleton was made up of at least three individuals – and the cranium and mandible were male.

What led our ancestors to mummify and combine these bodies is anyone’s guess. But Pearson thinks it has something to do with merging ancestries.

‘Lots of fields and ditches were being built across Britain in the middle Bronze Age’, he says. ‘An obvious thing to do would be to coalesce ancestors’ remains as a way of asserting rights over this newly enclosed land.‘

Cladh Hallan Round Houses

drewbhoy
drewbhoy Jan 1, 2024

Most people will now find the now well sign posted Cladh Hallan Round Houses and excellent they are. Walk to the north west and look for a gap in the dunes. Situated in this gap is another roundhouse gradually appearing or vanishing.

A double course of stonework remains on the southside and a single course of stonework marks the rest of the site. In nearby dunes stones are poking out so it would come as no surprise that other sites might one day discovered.

Further up the coast, a site has vanished.

Visited 07/08/2023.

Cladh Hallan Round Houses

1speed
1speed Aug 20, 2012

Visited 16 August 2012ce while cycle-touring in the Outer Hebrides.

Just to pick up on greywether’s comment about signposting, there is now a proper brown “tourist” sign on the B888 road in Dalabrog / Daliburgh to direct interested parties to the roundhouses, though as seems to be the norm on the islands this gives no indication of distance! After following a minor road / track almost to the modern-day burial ground of Cladh Hallan, a further footpath-style sign points the way to the roundhouses which lie a few minutes walk along a sandy track.

As for the roundhouses themselves, the southernmost has almost completely disappeared back into the dunes, but the central and northern houses are still visible as is the “smokery” just to the NE of the latter. Three interpretation boards have at some stage been set up on the rise overlooking the site from the N, but these have become detached from their supports (presumably blown off by the wind!) and now lie rather sadly, albeit neatly, on the ground.

Cladh Hallan Round Houses

greywether
greywether Aug 9, 2004

This site has been the subject of an hour-long TV programme which centred on the presentation of evidence for mummification of the burials in the roundhouses. This is summarised in Miscellaneous below.

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A recurring theme of the Uist postings is the way in which important sites are badly signposted (if at all) and poorly presented.

Perhaps you could argue that this leads to lower visitor numbers which helps with preservation and this site certainly needs all the help it can get.

Excavated out of a sand dune the sides of which are currently restrained by decaying plastic matting, it can only be a short time before windblown sand once again recovers the site – one which has produced a tantalising glimpse of life in late bronze age Britain.

This is not at all a criticism of the excavators who have done an excellent job in partly restoring the site when backfilling it might have been an easier option. Presumably there was just no local money available to make the job a more permanent one.

Strange. You would have thought that mummification is one of the few things that gets the general public interested in prehistory.

Visited 28 July 2004

Miscellaneous

Cladh Hallan Round Houses
Ancient Village / Settlement / Misc. Earthwork
greywether
greywether Aug 9, 2004

This is a brief summary of the points made in the Cladh Hallan tv programme. I’m sure it does not do justice to all the interesting points the excavator, Mike Parker Pearson, was making.

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The roundhouses date from about 1000bce.

In the NE quadrant of all three of the houses, burials had been interred. Sheep and dogs were in the upper levels but human burials were at the lowest level.

The human burials were articulated but crouched with the knees drawn tightly up under the chin. Radio carbon dating showed that, in two cases, the individuals had died up to 600 years before interment in the houses.

A number of scientific tests led to the view that these individuals had been preserved in a mummified state prior to their burial. Careful use of the acid in peat was a factor in the mummification process. The mummification was more likely to have been of the South American “in the open” type rather that in tombs like Egyptian mummies.

It was thought that these ancestors were preserved so that they could be brought out for important ceremonies or perhaps consulted in some way.

The bodies were eventually buried as part of a change in belief systems possibly introduced by newcomers to the area.

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