Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story:

• Archaeological research from the late Bronze Age in the Pannonian Plain shows how buried bones were commonly reused throughout communities.
• Bones were exhumed and passed around, sometimes in rituals and other times as social currency.
• The reuse practice spanned multiple communities across central Europe and lasted for centuries.

Human bones were a sort of social currency during the Late Bronze Age and Early Iron Age in central Europe. The skeletal remains of the deceased were often ripped apart, severed, and dug out of graves to serve a larger communal purpose throughout the Carpathian Basin’s Pannonian Plain from roughly 1600 to 700 B.C.E.

In a new study published in the Journal of Field Archaeology, researchers studied the mortuary practices across the plain—modern-day Serbia, Romania, and Hungary—spanning multiple centuries and sites near a variety of megafort settlements. They found that there was a highly complex and often very hands-on relationship between the living and the bones of the dead.

“Unburnt human remains were being curated and manipulated at almost all [Late Bronze Age] settlements in the lower Pannonian network excavated and analyzed to date,” the authors wrote.

Archaeological fieldwork, analysis of remains, and radiocarbon dating within some of the largest fortified settlements in the region showed that there was no uniform burial tradition. Practices included cremation, inhumation, and excarnation (leaving the body exposed so that weather and animals strip it to the bones). But one common practice researchers found was a surprise: human remains were regularly fragmented and “body parts reused in varied ways and contexts.”

Bones were commonly pulled apart and selectively reused in social settings. “Though cemeteries and settlements were differentiated by practices,” the authors wrote, “it is evident that the intersection between the living and the dead and where they encountered each other was not sharply divided in societies of the Late Bronze Age and the Early Iron Age in the Pannonian Plain.”

The blurring of boundaries between cemetery and settlement placed bones squarely in the center of everyday life. The authors found that individuals were “intentionally fragmented” upon their death. The removed bones were then placed inside pits within homes, in ditches around settlements, and sometimes reburied. It wasn’t random. At Klisa, in what’s now Croatia, bones were removed from graves and passed around the community, sorted by body part, and eventually reburied together in a new spot. Craniums were broken open to remove the brain, pieced back together, and then put on display within homes. In some cases, holes drilled into the skulls indicate that they were hung for viewing.

Bones commonly showed obvious signs of weathering, as if they were heavily handled. The experts believe that bones were part of the social fabric of communities around the region. The ditch burials may have been ritual, representing how ancestors protected the community. Displays in homes served to maintain a connection between the living and the dead. Passing bones around the community allowed them to serve as tools for societal cohesion, and indicated that the remains of their ancestors were central to the identities of these ancient communities.