Unlined pit burials are known from Dryburn Bridge, Broxmouth, Winton House, Inveresk, Musselburgh and Fishers Road East, Port Seton. With the exception of Fishers Road (which is a single example) all the other pit graves sites are argued to form parts of cemeteries. The practice of burying people in unlined pit graves appears to be long-lived. The Dryburn Bridge cemetery dates to between 800 BC to 400 BC, whereas Inveresk, Musselburgh dates to 50 BC to AD 90.
The Dryburn Bridge cemetery contained ten graves, each comprising the remains of an individual placed in a crouched position in the base of an unlined pit. The pits were not backfilled with the sand and gravel excavated from them, but were covered directly with stones either imported or reused from elsewhere on the site (such as disused houses or palisade lines). The generally curvilinear distribution of the majority of the graves is noticeable. This might suggest that the arrangement of graves within the cemetery formed some orderly sequence, but this cannot be distinguished within the set of radiocarbon dates.
The presence of four graves along the line of the outer enclosure palisade surely reflects an example of the structured deposition of significant deposits along a settlement boundary which formed important loci for structured deposition at various stages during the Iron Age (Hingley 1990). Burial 12 stands out from all the others excavated at Dryburn Bridge. The grave lay on a different orientation (north-west/south-east), the inhumed body faced south-west, and it was isolated from the rest of the graves and at what appears to be a significant location within the roundhouse settlement area, outside the entrance to House 6. This burial seems therefore to be a good candidate for a ‘special’ burial, perhaps a dedicative or commemorative deposit of some kind. Although there are some problems with some of the dates it does look like the majority of burials date to around 800-400BC (Dunwell 2007).
Two graves at Broxmouth were pit graves. Grave 1 was dated to 540 to 385 BC, grave 2 was dated to 595 to 400 BC, suggesting that both graves were broadly contemporary, indeed the excavators suggest that the Broxmouth pit graves may be local reflections of the same burial traditions seen at Dryburn Bridge, some 2.5km away.
Four Iron Age inhumation pit graves were identified during the course of the excavation at Musselburgh; of these three (766, 799 and 880) had simply been cut into the sand subsoil and then backfilled using the same material. Pit 766 contained two inhumation burials and Pit 799 contained a single inhumation burial. It is assumed that Pit 880 would also have contained a single inhumation, but the only surviving human remains consisted of a small quantity of tooth enamel. Radiocarbon dates obtained from three of the pits indicate that they were buried within a timescale ranging from 40 BC to AD 130. The broad similarity of the dates would seem to indicate that they were buried within a comparatively short time of each other. The excavators suggests that the dates from the pit graves places them withing the pre-Roman Iron Age (Kirby 2020).
Finally, three pit grave burials were found at Winton House. Burial 1 contained skeletal remains of two individuals, an adult female 18-25 years old, and a juvenile of about 10 years old. Burial 4 contained the skeleton of a male aged 40-45 and burial 5 contained only a few human bones. None of these burials could be dated (Dalland 1991).