ABSTRACT
Modern visitors to the island of Iona land at a stone jetty of fairly recent construction which leads up to the village. The earlier landing place was the gently sloping sand of Martyrs Bay some hundred yards to the north. The Ordnance Survey records burials within fifty yards of the site, and the mound and surrounding land have been left unploughed in living memory because of the human bones which had been discovered. All the lots except numbers 11 and 19 represented bodies fully extended on their backs, heads to the west, with very little variation in orientation, and upper arms at the sides with lower arms folded onto the lap. The absence of complete, well preserved skeletons, in which the totality of diagnostic features could be balanced, invariably enforced the estimation of age to be made on the basis of few characteristics often ones of no great reliability.
