In South East Scotland there are a few known, but limited examples of, cemeteries. Good examples are known from East Lothian: Broxmouth, Dryburn Bridge, Winton House, Black Rocks and Gullane.
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 800–400 BC (Dunwell 2007).
During excavations at Broxmouth, a small cemetery was found immediately outside the hillfort, to the north of the ramparts. It appears to have been short-lived, centred on a few decades around 200 BC, and probably represents no more than one or two generations of use. A further four burials were discovered within the fort. Most of the graves were lined and covered with stone slabs, most of the skeletons were of men and women in their early twenties. The graves were of varied type with a mixture of circular and oval grave pits, some stone lined and others not. None of the graves contained grave goods. The cemetery, small and short-lived, does provide some support for the vision of the Broxmouth community as broadly egalitarian in outlook. Men, woman and older children were buried in similar graves, with no grave goods and no signs of significant differentiation in death (Armit and McKenzie 2013).
Six burials were found at Winton House. Importantly the graves showed some variety in construction techniques: two graves were cists made from upright slabs; three were pit graves and the final was a drystone cist. Only burial 6 contained sufficient material for a radiocarbon determination between AD 10 to AD 340. The fact that none of the burial pits cut into each other led the excavator to suggest that all six graves were roughly contemporary, constituting part, or all, of a cemetery. Further, Dalland suggested that the similarities between the Broxmouth and Winton House cemeteries may indicate that they both derive from the same burial tradition which, based on the available dates, spans from the middle of the first millennium BC to the end of the third century AD (Dalland 1991).