Bronze Age Cemetery
Crouched burial of a woman in a stone cist
View larger image (171kb)
Image: Susan Mills, Museum and Heritage Service
On Friday 7th March 1828, a Bronze Age cemetery was found by workmen breaking up the surface of the road on the brow of Marshill in the centre of Alloa. The workmen found twenty-two cinerary urns, two gold bracelets and a cist burial. One of the urns survives, and the gold bracelets are displayed in the Museum of Scotland.
Intrigued by all this, I investigated the early accounts of the discovery, to see if I could throw more light on the cemetery, since no one knew its exact location on Marshill. Having pinpointed this, I then found that part of the land immediately next to the spot had recently been built on without any archaeological work being done; the rest was soon to be developed as well. Something needed to be done. The site's owners, Ochil View Housing Association Ltd., their architect and contractors, were all most helpful and soon a rescue excavation was underway. Topsoil was stripped off and on the 4th March 2003, almost 175 years to the day after the original discoveries, I found an undisturbed cist burial which must be part of the same cemetery.
A fine early Bronze Age Food Vessel
Image: Crown Copyright, reproduced
courtesy of Historic Scotland
The cist contained the skeleton of a woman buried in a crouched position with her head to the west. With her had been buried a finely decorated Early Bronze Age Food Vessel and a copper alloy awl. The cist was built of large sandstone slabs arranged like a box. There must once have been a stone cover, but this was missing and had probably been removed long ago. The skeleton was quite well preserved. The left hand may have been touching the pot originally,while the right hand was probably resting over the torso and holding the awl, which eventually came to rest against one of the vertebrae as the body decayed.
The Food Vessel is identified by Dr Alison Sheridan of the National Museums of Scotland as a tripartite vase of c. 2000 BC. We hope to obtain more evidence of date from radiocarbon determinations from bone collagen from the skeleton.
So now we have a better idea of the Alloa cemetery. With two cists, and twenty-two urns, each of which contained a cremation, our cemetery belongs to the middle range of such sites in Britain - and yet more burials could have been missed during the intermittent digging of the site in 1828. The gold bracelets, although later and not certainly from graves, imply considerable local wealth, at least by the later Bronze Age.
See also
Page & Site Tools
Contact information
For further information about this page please contact:
Museum and Heritage Officer,
Speirs Centre, Primrose Street, Alloa, FK10 1JJ
Tel: 01259 216913 / 450000
Email: museum@clacks.gov.uk
Or use the on-line contact form
