The Life Scientific: Jacqueline McKinley

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How much information can you extract from a burnt fragment of bone? The answer might surprise you because today, through a combination of science, technology and detective work... cremated bone and indeed other remains from ancient burial sites can tell us a huge amount about their backstories. This subterranean world where science meets history is where today's guest digs for answers, quite literally.

Jacqueline McKinley is a principal osteoarchaeologist with Wessex Archaeology and has analysed thousands of burial sites across the British Isles, dating from around 9000 BC through to the comparatively modern 18th century. Over her career, Jackie's brought to life ancient societies via burned bone fragments, helped criminal investigators with forensic analysis and contributed to some of Britain's best-loved archaeological TV shows.

And one thing she's absolutely clear on is that far from being macabre, osteoarchaeology is actually more about the living than the dead. That being said, we are going to be talking a lot about bones, burials and skeletal remains over the next half hour. So if you are eating your breakfast, you have been warned. Jacqueline McKinley, welcome to The Life Scientific. Hello.

When it comes to ancient cremation sites, what sort of things might you discover there? Because some people might assume it's just ash. Well, technically it is ash because ash is just the inorganic remains that are left behind once you've burnt something. And that's what cremation is. It's a process of oxidation and dehydration, getting rid of the organic components of the body.

Most people, when they think of cremation, tend to think of very small particle ashes, which you get from modern crematoria. But in a modern cremator, when the... cremation process itself is done, you do have identifiable skeletal elements remaining. And what happens then is that material is raked out and it goes into a machine called a cremulator. Now this is a bit like a tumble dryer with holes in the side and it's got metal balls inside it and that goes round and round and crushes.

those bones down until they're big enough to go through the holes in the side. And that's why people, when they think of cremated material, are thinking about small particle size. But that doesn't happen just by burning it. You see, I never knew that. And in ancient times, they didn't have the machines that would break bone down. So I get complete identifiable pieces of skeletal elements. So I can tell things about how many individuals, what age and sex they were.

etc but also what we're trying to understand is the whole mortuary right and you also get Pyre goods, materials that went on the pyre with the deceased. So that could be items they were wearing, personal ornamentation or animal remains. There's an awful lot you can actually get out of analysing cremated material. Cremation is your speciality, Jackie, but you do also study sites where bodies have been buried.

That's correct. And burial isn't the only thing that happens. There can be a whole variety of activities. So you might get various forms of excarnation where you've either exposed a body and then you... collect those bones once they're sort of transformed from a recognisable corpse to just the bone itself. That material could then be curated in a variety of ways. doesn't cease to be of relevance to the community.

in which that person would have lived. I mean, that's what's so fascinating here, that you learn so much about the people during that time. You're not just learning about the bones themselves or the remains. Tell me, what's the most memorable thing you've ever found on a dig? Ooh, crikey, now you're asking me. I think the most... startling thing I remember finding was from a Romano-British cemetery just north of Salisbury. And there, one of the burials had been made in a stone sargophagus.

But what they hadn't done was put a drainage hole in it. So the body lickers, as the body's decomposing, will drain out. Because otherwise what happens is you get a very acid environment within the coffin. Now that's... very good for preserving organic materials. And in this particular case, when we took the lid off the sarcophagus, inside the person had been buried wearing the most amazing pair. of deerskin boots and there were cork

Inner souls, which, you know, you think of Dr Scholl and Birkenstocks and, you know, it's modern. But actually, no, the Romans had thought about this first. As they've done so often. Indeed. So this is something like two millennia. Yeah. Yeah, we're talking about late Roman period in Britain, so it's about 350 AD.

You've studied burial practices and death rituals spanning millennia. That's obviously a very broad spectrum to draw conclusions from. But would you say ancient attitudes to death were very different to those of the present day? Certainly I think... The attitudes towards death in the West now is slightly different to what it would have been in the past. In fact, it's slightly different to what it is in lots of other parts of the world and not that long ago in the UK. But it was a display.

You displayed the dead. They had to be seen. Whereas now we tend to perhaps hide away a little bit more than we should. We don't get to see them as much as people in the past would have done. And I think this would serve... variety of purposes. You recognise that somebody has passed from one state to another, but also that they may have gone on somewhere else and you have prepared them for that next stage in their journey.

And like I said, even sort of 60, 70 years ago, I remember my mother saying that her auntie was the lady who... laid out the dead in the village when they died, the small village they lived in. So you quite often would view people in their homes laid out on their beds. So it's quite a recent thing, isn't it? It is. And I think it's become more... scary as a result. In the spirit of accepting death and celebrating the process, I hear you took a rather...

Unusual step when your father passed away a decade ago. Yes, well, my pops was determined he was going to be cremated and I discussed with him about could I have some of his bones. when he had been cremated, because I rather like the idea of having some remains go with mine, because I fully intend to be cremated as well. And, you know, the idea of us being able to be together forever. I'm going to start...

Tearing up now. But the idea of being able to be together forever is just something that appealed to both him and to me. So I did have to jump through some hoops when I went to the crematory and say, yes, it's all right. I do know what I'm doing. It's OK. But I was allowed to.

to collect his bones from the cremator before they went through the cremulator. So they were still recognisable bones. So I have some of his hand bones and some of his foot bones. And we always used to joke about the size of his nose. So I had to have some of dad's nasal bones as well. And I've got those and they will be going with me eventually. I mean, that is quite... Lovely, isn't it? Because a fragment of bone is a much more recognisable part of that person than just the ash.

It is indeed. And it's something that I have noticed in ancient cremations that I've looked at. I don't think there's anything new about this idea. That sort of emotive desire to have somebody's remains with you forever. I certainly find what I refer to as token quantities of bone from another individual mixed in with a cremation burial. And I think the same thing has been happening.

Right. Well, let's hear more about your family and childhood in Yorkshire, Jacqueline McKinley. You were born in the late 1950s in an old mill village. That's right. I think I was actually the last child to be born in that particular mill village. And it really was just two rows of houses that were attached to the mill, that had been built by the mill owner. And what did your parents do?

Well, my mother, like many of her family, was a textile worker. So she did something called burling and mending, checking over all the pieces of cloth to make sure there were no errors in them and putting those right. It's a very skilled job. My father did a bit of all sorts of things before the war, but after the war he trained as a nurse. in the National Health Service and eventually went on to be a psychiatric nurse. And did you have much interest in science as a youngster?

My mother said I was interested in everything, which for an archaeologist is probably just about ticks the boxes really. But my dad did have some surgical books and I did used to like looking at the pictures. Just fascinated by how things worked, really. Well, clearly a very curious mind then. And you did well at school. When it came to thinking about university, you decided to opt for archaeological sciences. Now, why that course? When I was about 15, I saw a television programme.

with Magnus Magnusson. And he was at a place called Scarabray in Orkney, which is a Neolithic village. And I remember thinking, I don't just want to read about it, I want to find it. And the archaeological science course at Bradford University is the one I ended up doing. So thanks in part to Magnus Magnusson, in 1977, you started at Bradford.

But it was during your third year, Jackie, that your fascination with bones and cremated remains began. Tell me how that happened. Well, Bradford was actually a four-year course, but the third year was spent... out in the field. And I spent the first six months in Orkney. That was where I first came across cremated remains. And I remember trying to clean this bone, wets of it, basically.

in a cold bothy in october in orkney with basically a garden sieve to get all the soil off it because realistically it's the only way of doing it and thinking nobody's ever going to be able to do anything with this. You know, little did I know that later on in life, I would be one such person. But then in my second half of my year out, I was in North Wales. I was working on Anglesey with the...

Gwyneth Archaeological Trust, excavating an early Bronze Age cremation cemetery, mostly earned remains made in inverted vessels. And they were what I ended up working on in my final year for my dissertation. Right. So at that point, how much were you able to discover about those bone fragments? Presumably the investigative process available in the late 1970s was pretty limited. It's all visual identification. So what we need to do is be able to identify specific skeletal elements.

Pick out the elements that will give us information about the age and the sex of the individual, if we can. See any paleopathology or pathological lesions. But also then we're judging how well cremated the bone is. was and what might have happened to it during that cremation process so we're trying to understand both about the individual and then about the burial that final part of the process

Well, the field has come a long way since then. We're going to talk about some of the advances in a minute. But coming back to you, Jackie, after graduating in 1981, you spent a couple of years working as a research assistant at the university, then started freelancing as an archaeological scientist for hire I guess. What exactly did that involve? Well I was a field archaeologist so excavation is in itself a skill.

You don't just dig holes, you excavate carefully. You're looking for formation processes to understand how things got in the ground. And everything... is recorded in drawings, photographs, by individual number and context. And those records are the archive that people will use to be able to interpret what you have excavated.

Well, Jackie, let's get into the science then behind the skeletons. You were working all over the country at this point, and I gather the state of bones can vary hugely depending on their geological... Indeed. This is to do with soil acidity. If you have a highly acid soil, now acid soils would be heavy clay soils, silicious sands, gravels, things like that.

will damage the mineral component of the bone bone is about 70 percent mineral so that can be quite deleterious to the survival of that bone On the other hand, you've got alkaline soils. This is things like chalk. What that tends to have a bad effect on is organic components. So you might have something that looks good, it's well preserved, but things within the bone that you might need to do other types of science.

analysis on may have gone. So it depends very much on what your soil conditions are. And when it comes to getting more detailed information about cremated remains, what sort of tests can you use? Well, the most important new development in the past 20, 30 years is to be able to radiocarbon date cremated bone, which we couldn't do, certainly when I started working in this field.

Because with normal radiocarbon dating, you're using the organic component of the bone. That didn't work with cremated material because, of course... You've oxidised it, you've got rid of all those organic components. But what was discovered was that during the cremation process, at a temperature of about 600 degrees centigrade, you get something called a sintering process.

And at that point, the crystal structure of the calcium phosphate breaks down and reforms. So it creates a bigger, more brittle crystal structure. And in that breakdown process... That new crystal form traps carbons within the crystal. Right. And that is what they have learnt to extract, that carbon that's trapped during that sintering process. I love science.

Well, in 1985, Jackie, you received a letter from the Norfolk archaeological unit asking for your help on a rather special site. Tell me about Spong Hill. Right. Well, I kind of panicked when I got that letter because I had been doing freelance work and fairly small assemblages of cremated remains, sort of 20, 30 burials at a go. And I got this letter from the Norfolk Union.

and they said, we've got two and a half thousand Anglo-Saxon cremation burials from this site. And I thought, oh my goodness, that's going to take me forever. But Spong Hill was a early... anglo-saxon cremation cemetery so it probably started about 420 AD it was the largest cremation cemetery that's ever been found. So these were urns? They were all urns burials. And the Anglo-Saxons...

particularly would put a lot of animal remains on the pyres. Now, it's quite common to get animal bone in cremation burials of any period. But the early Anglo-Saxon period, they were very flamboyant in what they would put on there. So horse was particularly common. And it was an entire horse, which is quite a big creature. And then you might get also entire dogs.

You wanted to know more, though, and in the absence of the modern technical processes to analyse these bone fragments, you turned to somewhere else for answers. A modern crematorium? Yes, I'd been reading. People were saying things like, oh, there's not much bone in here because it had all cremated away. The cremation was so efficient. And I thought, I'm not sure that would happen. So I thought the best thing to do was to go to crematoria.

and actually see what happens in a controlled environment designed to be efficient. And of course, what I discovered was that far from disappearing into nothingness, you get a recognisable skeleton. at the end of the cremation process. So I thought, well, fair enough, if this is the case, then this business about it all disappearing is quite clearly nonsense. And of course, that then helped you... bust myths about how the cremated remains at Spong Hill, for example, were treated.

at the point of burial. Yeah, what became apparent was that a lot of that breakage can take place while it's in the ground because soil gets into those dehydration fissures that form during cremation and it gets wet and dry and wet and dry, expands and contracts. cracks and breaks the bone up. So that's why it looks like it does when we get it to the lab. Well, following the Spong Hill project in 1993, you joined Wessex Archaeology as a field archaeologist.

And I know you've been involved with a huge variety of excavations over the three decades since you joined Wessex Archaeology. So I'm just going to pick out a particularly juicy discovery. In 2004...

You were asked to excavate a Bronze Age site in Ramsgate. Tell me about that. That was, I have to say, one of the most remarkable sites I think I've ever worked on. On the surface, it looked like nothing, but it contained the most remarkable assemblage of late Bronze Age remains that went into the early and the Middle Iron Age. All this was umber remains in various states. In the base of the earliest pit, we had remains of an elderly female who was killed.

by several sword blows to the back of the skull. Now, at this time, swords were very, very high status items. So this appeared to be a sacrificial victim. She'd been arranged together with two children and a teenager who'd been laid on top of a cattle carcass. And higher up in the fill... of this pit there were bundles of skulls and long bones. They had obviously been curated. Right.

So you're gaining a lot of insights about how Bronze Age inhabitants treated their dead. Well, the interesting thing was these weren't just local to this area because as well as having... radiocarbon dating done on them. We also had strontium isotope analysis undertaken on the tooth enamel. Now that will tell us where somebody came from.

inasmuch as strontium is taken up from the groundwater during the time that that tooth enamel is forming. And what this showed us was that we had individuals who were local. to the Kent area. We had individuals who came from possibly Scandinavia but also we had people from the Mediterranean. So we had all these people coming together in one place.

So something odd was going on here that might be related to other features that we found on site, which were enclosures in which we knew that feasting had been undertaken. And it looks like you've got people coming together from... different places possibly trading places for

a purpose we're not entirely sure of. But it's fascinating stuff. And it's not only archaeological sites where you've put your skills into practice over the years. You've also been called on a few times to assist with police investigations, particularly... in cases involving burnt remains. Do you remember your first experience of that? Yes, I think what happened in that particular case was the deceased had been burnt on a bomb fire together with some animal remains.

The idea presumably being that nobody would be able to tell the difference between the human bone and the animal bone, which, of course, you can. So it was possible to take the two apart and to identify... quite a lot of the human bone and to be able to give a rough age and I think it was a young female as it turned out to that individual which of course assisted with the case.

Nowadays, that field of forensic anthropology has become quite specialised. A good example being a previous guest we've had on The Life Scientific, Baroness Sue Black, who's helped on many criminal cases herself. And funnily enough, it was thanks to Sue...

that you got involved with a major international investigation around war crimes in Kosovo. Yes, the lovely Sue Black. I've known Sue for many, many years. She's an absolute star. She was setting up teams of people to go out via the Foreign Commonwealth Office. to work in Kosovo, helping with identifying skeletal remains that had come out of the graves that they were investigating. Obviously, they have a forensic pathologist there, but the pathologist...

is most specialised in looking at soft tissues. So we went along to assist and help speed at the process. And it was also a massive learning process. How much were you able to find out? you got, you know, remains in a whole variety of conditions. So what we were assisting with was identifying or confirming the age and the sex of the individual who the written records had said was there.

and also helping confirm potential cause of death where it affected the bone. But also we occasionally did have cases where houses had been burnt down and we were dealing with burnt material. And in that case, then we were the principal people working with it rather than the forensic pathologist. So numbers of individuals that you were dealing with, possible conditions under which they were burnt, and again, trying to work out the age and sex.

I mean, it's one thing studying remains in a burial site from hundreds or thousands of years ago. It must be quite another investigating mass war graves. Was that a... very difficult experience for you um until i got there i didn't really know how i'd be able to cope with it but as it is it goes into a different box i know it sounds a bit weird but you put in a different box you're there to do a job so you can simply

with the people who've lost their dead, but you don't get too involved in it because that does not help you do what you're out there to do.

Now then, forensics isn't the only extra string to your bow. Some people might know you from television because you've been a contributor to some very popular British TV programmes over the years, starting in the mid-90s with Time Team. presented by the actor Tony Robinson. You've also been a regular contributor on the archaeology show Digging for Britain, presented by anthropologist Alice Roberts, who's another of our past guests.

Just last year, they did a big report on an ancient grave that you and the Wessex archaeology team uncovered in Lincolnshire, which I gather was also quite a special find. It was indeed. Again, that was Anglo-Saxon. And in one of the graves, we had two individuals had been buried, a teenage female and a young boy. And because they were buried together...

It was assumed they must be related in some way. We are still awaiting the full... dna results because like i said dna doesn't happen overnight but we know they are not immediately linked They're not brother and sister. They're not mother and child. And it's a matter of watching this space. But she was buried with some quite...

wonderful remains, which is what caught people's imagination. It's always the bling. It's always the bling. And she was buried with gold and silver pendants, which are really quite beautiful things. You semi-retired last year, so what's next? Any...

Burning ambitions, if you'll excuse the pun. Well, I have got several things that I'm working on still for Wessex. But what I'd like to do, I think, when I sort of retire slightly further... is I have looked at literally thousands of cremation burials across my now several decades of work, but I've never really had chance to sit down and pull it all together. I suppose, cremation through the ages in the British Isles. There's a TV series ready to be made.

If it's not too macabre a question to end with, Jackie, do you ever think about what you'd like your burial ritual to be? What you might leave for osteoarchaeologists of the future to find? Oh, I'm going to set a real conundrum. Needless to say, I will be cremated. And I'm going to ask not to be cremulated. Obviously, parts of my father will be with me. I also have quite a few of my own.

pets who have passed on and I'm going to put their cremated remains in with me as well and it will be intriguing to see what a future osteoarchaeologist comes up with they're going to be thinking you know unlike most of society in the western world in the 21st century this was a really unusual find

Maybe something for all of us to consider there. Jackie McKinley, thank you very much for sharing your life scientific. Pleasure to be here. And thank you for listening. I'm Jamal Kalili and my producer is Lucy Taylor. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to BBC.com.

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