The discovery in Llanmaes, South Wales, of a large midden dating from the Early Iron Age provided an opportunity to deepen our understanding of feasting in late prehistoric Britain. But the dominance of right fore-limbs of pigs in the faunal assemblage has raised questions about the social processes represented by this activity. The evidence suggests a move away from conspicuous consumption by an Early Iron Age elite towards a more community-focused event designed to galvanise social relations at a time when the breakdown of bronze exchange networks was challenging the social order.

Ancient Egyptians are thought to have been the only people in the Old World who were practising mummification in the Bronze Age (c. 2200-700 BC). But now a remarkable series of finds from a remote Scottish island indicates that Ancient Britons were performing similar, if less elaborate, practices of bodily preservation. Evidence of mummification is usually limited to a narrow range of arid or frozen environments which are conducive to soft tissue preservation. Mike Parker Pearson and his team show that a combination of microstructural, contextual and AMS 14C analysis of bone allows the identification of mummification in more temperate and wetter climates where soft tissues and fabrics do not normally survive. Skeletons from Cladh Hallan on South Uist, Western Isles, Scotland were buried several hundred years after death, and the skeletons provide evidence of post mortem manipulation of body parts. Perhaps these practices were widespread in mainland Britain during the Bronze Age.

The brochs, great stone towers of Iron Age Scotland, are famously puzzling. Who inhabited these strongholds (if habitations they were)? New fieldwork at the broch of Dun Vulan, on South Uist in the Western Isles, prompts reappraisal of the geographical and social context of the brochs, by developing untapped sources of social evidence.