Raptor: A Journey Through Birds

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The darkness Ronnie Simison’s spade had cut loose from the mound that summer’s evening was 5,000 years old. The mound was a Neolithic chambered cairn, and staring back at Simison when he sparked his lighter into the dark hole was a shelf of human skulls, resinous in the flickering light. There might have been a second or two when Simison mistook the bones’ bronzed colours for a cache of treasure before he realised what they were, grabbed his spade, and ran.

When the tomb came to be excavated, amongst the human bones it was discovered that there were many bones and talons belonging to white-tailed sea eagles. In all, seventy sea-eagle talons were found and, in some instances, the birds’ talons had been placed beside the bones of human individuals (one person had been buried with fifteen talons and the bones of two sea eagles). It is estimated that there were thirty-five skeletons of birds of prey in the tomb and of these two-thirds belonged to sea eagles.

The sea eagle was clearly a bird of totemic significance for the people living in that part of Orkney at that time. Presumably the bird performed some sort of funerary or shamanistic role for the community, perhaps in accompanying the dead on their journey to the afterlife, perhaps in assisting shamans in their magico-religious ceremonies. The importance of birds in shamanistic rituals is well known and there are archaeological examples from different cultures around the world of birds being involved in ceremonial and mortuary practices. In Alaska archaeologists unearthed a grave from a proto-Eskimo settlement at Ipiutak in which an adult and a child had been interred alongside, amongst other artefacts, the head of a loon (a species of diver). Strikingly, the diver’s skull had lifelike artificial eyes (carved ivory for the white of the eye inlaid with jet for the black pupils) placed in its eye sockets. It’s possible these ivory eyes served as a prophylactic to ward against evil (some human skulls from the settlement also contained artificial eyes). Equally, the eyes may have been placed in the diver in recognition of the belief amongst circumpolar peoples that the loon, a totemic bird for these cultures, was a bird with the power to both restore sight and also assist shamans with seeing into – and travelling through – different worlds.

In the museum a mile from the tomb some of the skulls have been given names: ‘Jock Tamson’, ‘Granny’, ‘Charlie-Girl’. Beside the skulls there were pieces of pottery, fragments of bowl decorated by the imprint of human fingernails. The nails had scratched the wet clay and left a pattern like a wavy barcode around the bowl’s rim. I picked some of the sea-eagle talons out of their case and held them in my palm, running my fingers over their blunted points. They were smooth to touch, like polished marble, their creamy colours flecked with rust.

The human bones, in contrast to the eagle and other animal bones in the cairn, were found to be in poor condition, noticeably bleached and weathered. This weathering suggests that the human dead were excarnated, given ‘sky burials’, their bodies exposed to the elements on raised platforms to be cleaned by natural decay and carrion feeders like the sea eagle. Besides the eagle bones, which were by far the most numerous, there were also bones of other carrion-feeding birds inside the tomb: two greater black-backed gulls, two rooks or crows and one raven. Once the excarnation process had been completed, the human skeletons – their bones scattered by carrion birds and bleached by the sun – would have been gathered up and interred inside the tomb.

That the sea eagles were involved in the excarnation of the human dead on Orkney is almost certain given that the bird is such a prodigious carrion feeder. Excarnation: the separation (of the soul) from the body at death, the opposite of incarnation, where the soul or spirit is clothed, embodied in flesh. Excarnation is not just a method for disposing the dead (to excarnate means to remove the flesh). It was also, for some societies, the process by which the spirit or soul could be released from the flesh. Tibetan Buddhists believed that the vultures summoned to a sky burial were spirits of the netherworld come to assist the soul on its journey to its next incarnation. In parts of the Western Highlands of Scotland it was unlucky to kill seagulls because it was believed the birds housed the souls of the dead. For what better, more natural place to rehome the soul – the restless, fidgety soul – than a bird, whose shape and movement, whose own restless flight, could be said to resemble the soul? Perhaps the Neolithic peoples of Orkney believed something similar, that when sea eagles, this great totemic bird, cleaned the bodies of their dead, the person’s spirit, which after death still lived on inside the flesh, was taken in by the eagle. The spirit or soul transmigrated to the bird, lived on inside the bird. Human and eagle fusing – literally, ceremonially – each one inhabiting the other.