Funerary remains of any kind are scarce across most of Iron Age Britain, their paucity leading to suggestions that Iron Age burial traditions may have left little or no archaeological trace. That is, the majority of people were not buried in formal burials, instead being disposed of in other means such as cremation and scattering.
Formal inhumation is rare and cemeteries especially rare. Inhumation practices were diverse. For example, in East Lothian some individuals were buried in simple slab-built cists (eg House of the Binns), others were buried in more complex dry-stone coursed graves (eg Empire Cinema, Dunbar and Dunbar Golf Course). Multiple burials within a single cist, as seen at the House of the Binns and Empire Cinema site, suggest familial or social connections and complex burial sequences. Broxmouth is unusual in having multiple burial types and a more formal cemetery.
Grave goods, though rare, typically include personal ornaments like penannular brooches and pins, often associated with clothing. These items reflect identity and status, with some brooches possibly child-specific. Some burials included weapons, which implies status or warrior identity. Textile preservation on metal fasteners has provided rare insights into Iron Age clothing, revealing coarse wool and finer linen garments. Nutritional stress indicators and isotope analysis offer clues to health and local origins, reinforcing the community-based nature of these burials. Some of these burials are artefactually quite rich in objects, such as the Burnmouth ‘spoons’, brooches and other objects (Craw and Robinson 1923; Roy 2015).
More common than formal inhumation across most of Iron Age Britain are partial or complete human bodies placed into apparently non-funerary contexts such as grain pits, ditched boundaries, house floors and walls, and caves.
One thing is clear, the disposal of the dead in a formal burial let alone a dedicated cemetery may have been the exception rather than the rule. Moreover, the elusive burial rite may have been much more closely integrated into the function of settlements or traditions that leave little, if any trace.
South East Scotland is quite rare in that it has examples of all traditions: cremations, pit graves, cave deposits, structural deposits, formal burials (including slab-lined cists, drystone cists) and exceptional burials such as the Newbridge chariot burial. Rare examples of constructed graves, particularly the Dunbar ‘warrior’ burial and the Newbridge chariot burial have been classed as ‘a special rite over and above whatever was locally the dominant means of disposal of the dead’ and/or ‘unique and anomalous’. The East Lothian evidence has been summarised by Armit and MacKenzie where they listed 35 examples of Iron Age burials (2014). This list can be updated given recent publications, for example at Musselburgh, Inveresk (Kirby 2020).