Home
Membership
These Iron Age bodies were all buried in the same bizarre way. What does it mean?

These Iron Age bodies were all buried in the same bizarre way. What does it mean?

The excavation of a 2,000 year old burial site revealed eighteen skeletons buried upright, and archaeologists have a few theories about why

Overhead view of a human skeleton buried in a seated position within a circular pit at an archaeological excavation in Dijon, France.

Colin Barras

Published: August 6, 2026 at 3:53 PM

Save

Archaeologists tend to spend a lot of time with the dead. But occasionally, an ancient burial they unearth surprises even them.

This was the case during recent excavations at a site near Dijon in France. At a settlement from Iron Age Gaul, dating to between 2,400 and 2,000 years old, a team from the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (INRAP) found the skeletal remains of at least 18 bodies, each buried sitting upright.

Seated burials are almost unheard of today, and they were equally rare in the past.

Previous research has uncovered just a few dozen seated burials from the entire Iron Age of ancient Gaul – an area covering most of modern France and some neighbouring countries. This makes the 18 or so seated burials discovered near Dijon a significant find, and hints that the ancient site was a particularly important one.

“Where we find larger numbers of seated burials, we usually find a temple nearby,” says archaeologist Andrew Lamb at the University of Edinburgh, who wasn’t involved in the excavations but discussed them with HistoryExtra. “I wouldn’t be surprised if they find something big like a temple in the vicinity of the Dijon site, if it has survived.”

Archaeologists work within a large urban excavation trench in Dijon, with a human skull visible in a small circular burial pit in the foreground.

Archaeologists excavate an Iron Age burial site in central Dijon, where several people were found interred in seated positions. A skull is visible within one of the circular grave pits | Credit: Getty Images

The Dijon finds are yet to be formally published, but in a statement issued earlier this year the INRAP team sketched out their initial findings. All of the dead had been buried in a similar manner, with each body placed at the bottom of a metre-wide circular pit and positioned to face west. All appear to have been adult men, between 40 and 60 years of age, and the skeletons suggest all had enjoyed good health during their lives. Five or six of the skeletons show signs of injuries that hadn’t healed before death, possibly indicating at least some of the men might have been intentionally killed shortly before burial.

Read more | A brief guide to the British Iron Age

None of this explains exactly why the bodies were buried in a seated position, facing west, and the INRAP researchers didn’t speculate on the subject in their press statement. But previously published research might help us understand the puzzle that these mysterious burials present.

Did seated burials have special significance?

All burials from the European Iron Age are significant, regardless of the orientation of the body in the ground. This is because archaeologists think that most people in Europe were cremated at this point in history. “If you take Ireland during the Iron Age, you have maybe just 0.5 per cent of the population turning up in the burial record,” says Lamb.

This rarity of burials isn’t unique to Iron Age Europe.

Although the practice is popular today, burial has been the exception rather than the rule since it emerged as a human funerary rite about 130,000 years ago. The relatively few bodies that were committed to the ground feature prominently in our thinking about the past. But this is largely because buried bodies have a good chance of long-term survival, making them easier for archaeologists to find. Other funerary rites must have been available but many may have involved the rapid destruction of the body, which makes them far less archaeologically visible.

“Every now and again, you see a paper published about the missing dead, about this idea that remains were treated in different ways that we just don’t see,” says Tom Booth, an archaeologist at University College London, speaking to HistoryExtra. “It can give you a bit of vertigo because you suddenly get a sense of the depth of what we are missing.”

The reluctance to bury bodies isn’t difficult to understand. In earlier times – especially before the development of agriculture – population densities were low. “Why would you decide to dig a hole when there was plenty of open space where you could just place the body?” says Booth. “Digging a hole is not the most practical approach.”

Close-up of a human skeleton buried upright in a compact seated position within a shallow circular pit at an archaeological site in Dijon.

The remains of an Iron Age individual buried in a tightly flexed seated position at the Dijon excavation. Such burials are exceptionally rare in ancient Gaul | Credit: Getty Images

If burying a body isn’t practical, choosing to place a body in a seated position within the grave is even less so. That makes these Iron Age burials even more of a mystery. “It’s very difficult to keep a body in that position, especially because we’ve evolved to be top-heavy with a big cranium,” says Lamb. “Bodies will fall forwards, or they will slip to the side.”

Why, then, did Iron Age Europeans take on such an impractical and challenging task? As is often the case in archaeology, there are no clear answers. But there are clues.

For instance, the archaeological evidence shows that at least some Iron Age seated burials were committed to the ground during festivals that must have involved most of the community. The best evidence of this comes from the site of Acy-Romance, which lies a few hundred kilometres to the north of Dijon. Here, at an ancient temple complex, archaeologists have unearthed 19 seated burials. Their research suggests the bodies belonged to sacrificial victims killed during a midwinter festival. Each body was then taken inside the temple and placed in a small wooden box, in which it was compressed into a contorted sitting position and left to naturally mummify for the rest of the winter. Finally, the mummified seated body was interred in a pit near the temple.

Read more | For decades, this prehistoric grave was a mystery. Have its dark secrets now been revealed?

Such elaborate treatment of the dead was clearly linked to cultural belief, says Booth. One suggestion is that some Iron Age communities saw seated burials as symbolic conduits for communication between the living and the dead, perhaps explaining why they were placed in a seated position – a pose associated with the living. Three seated burials at the site of Reviers in northern France potentially fit with this idea. All three were buried facing towards a nearby river, and rivers were important routes of communication during the Iron Age.

But this ritualistic explanation doesn’t necessarily apply to all Iron Age seated burials, or to seated burials from other periods. “You get them occasionally distributed over the last 5,000 years or so, and I think it’s a mistake to think they are all linked in some way,” says Booth.

Why are we so fascinated by Iron Age seated burials?

Ancient burials offer evidence of how vanished communities responded to death. “I think they speak to something deep, trying to get inside the heads of people who lived in the past,” says Lamb.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean we find all ancient burials – or even all seated burials – equally fascinating. For instance, in 2013, archaeologists published a study on the early farmers buried at Tell Halula, a 10,000-year-old Neolithic settlement located in Syria. All of these early farmers were wrapped in shrouds and buried in seated positions. The research received almost no media attention.

Lamb thinks that the broader context may help explain why the seated burials near Dijon fascinate modern audiences. “The Iron Age is really quite close to our modern time. People may identify with the Iron Age in a way they don’t with the Neolithic,” he says. For people of European descent, Iron Age Europeans may even feel like members of the family and discovering that they deliberately propped up their dead in the grave might feel a little unsettling, says Lamb.

But this discomfort arguably tells us as much about modern sensibilities as it does about Iron Age communities. In modern western cultures, very few people interact with dead bodies, and the idea of manipulating the dead into a particular pose might seem distasteful or disturbing. “Death today has become sanitised and professionalised, and it’s something many of us encounter infrequently,” says Lamb.

Roman Britain | A short course from HistoryExtra Academy

Member exclusive | In this four-week course, discover everything you need to know about Roman Britain, guided by Rob Collins, professor of frontier archaeology at Newcastle University. Explore the course now

Authors

Colin BarrasFreelance journalist