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Description: | A collection of buried human remains from all archaeological periods and human parts used for a variety of purposes, drawn from across the departments and museums of Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service.
The majority of the collection is represented by excavated bones and teeth, including major site archives of cemeteries, notably the Anglo-Saxon cremation cemetery at Spong Hill, North Elmham and the medieval cemetery of St. Margaret's Incombusto, Magdalen Street, Norwich. The bones have been studied to provide evidence of the character of past populations (demography) and evidence of diseases, surgery and violent death. Many of the individual human skeletons and bones were found by people undertaking building work and made their way into the collection via the police. The collection includes the articulated skeleton on display in the Mammal Gallery at the Castle Museum. There are a few Egyptian mummies within the collection. Also included are medieval witch bottles which were filled with human hair, among other things, and buried within houses to offer protection to the inhabitants. This element of protection is also represented by some babies' cauls (the thin membrane covering a newborn's head); sailors believed carrying a caul aboard would protect them from shipwreck. Human remains are also used to remind people of their departed loved ones, this is most commonly expressed by lockets of human hair; in the Victorian period the tradition expanded into entire pieces of jewellery being made from human hair; several are in the collection. There are also practical examples for the use of human hair in the collection, as wigs, hair pieces, hair for dolls, hair nets, eyelashes made from real hair and hair sieves. Ethnographic items within the collection, acquired many years ago, demonstrate some unusual and powerful uses for human remains; for example a drum from Borneo made of two skulls and a West African skull decorated with shells. Finally, there are some quite gruesome objects, including the mummified hand of Sir John Heydon, severed in a duel in 1600.
The collection is supported by some plaster casts of the skulls of early hominids
Spong Hill excavation archive, St. Margaret's Incombusto excavation archive, | Format: | 450 objects together with over 2000 boxes of site archive material | Subjects: | Palaeopathology Bones Anthropology Archaeology Human remains (archaeology) Egyptology Ethnology Hair | Temporal: | Medieval 1066-1500 Saxon 400-1066 Bronze age 2500BC- 700BC Romano-British 0-500 Stone age - pre 2500BC | Source: | Cornucopia - Discovering UK Collections | FAX: | +44 (0)1603 493623 | Telephone: | +44 (0)1603 493625 | Identifier: | oai:www.cornucopia.org.uk:7132 | Format: | 450 objects together with over 2000 boxes of site archive material | Go to resource |
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