Nun the wiser - the ‘lost’ early medieval nuns of Iona, Martyr’s Bay

The burial ground at Martyr’s Bay is part of a larger Christian ceremonial landscape on the island of Iona, which lies just off the larger island of Mull in Scotland’s Inner Hebrides. The bay is supposedly named for the Ionan monks who were massacred there by viking raiders in the early 9th century AD. Richard Reece’s excavations in the 1960s discovered the long cist cemetery, and the initial osteological assessment by Calvin Wells highlighted that this group of people were enigmatic and deserved further study. New biomolecular work and radiocarbon determinations from Martyr’s Bay and the Abbey, carried out as part of the Leverhulme Trust funded ‘ArchaeoFINS’ project and the Wellcome Trust funded ‘A Thousand Ancient Britons’ project, have revealed fascinating new information about the people interred at this site. This, coupled with new osteological assessments by the National Museum of Scotland, where the remains are curated, is shedding fresh light on these women and their involvement in the story of early Christianity in Britain and Ireland.