Archaeologists in Ukraine have discovered red lumps of cinnamon – a mineral form of the highly toxic chemical mercury sulfide – in a 1,900-year-old double burial of two Scythian women, according to a new study.
The deep red pigment, also called vermilion, has also been found in other prehistoric graves in Europe and may have been sprinkled on the recently dead to give them a reddish “flush” of life.
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“We know that a crypt can function for up to 50 years in a row,” first author study Olena Dzneladzean archaeologist at Ukraine’s National Academy of Sciences told LiveScience in an email. “We know for sure thanks to excavations that the Late Scythian crypts were opened and secondary and tertiary burials took place.”
The shooters were a diverse but culturally related group of nomads who lived on the Eurasian steppe stretching from Ukraine to China from c. 800 BC to 300 AD The double burial with cinnamon dates to the first to early second century AD, towards the end of the culture.
The traces of cinnamon were found in a single grave containing the remains of two women at Chervony Mayak, a Late Scythian burial ground in the south of the country on the Dnieper River. One of the women was between 35 and 45 when she died, and the remains of a younger woman, between 18 and 20, were buried in the same grave at a later date. The women were buried with several grave goods, including beads, pottery and metal objects.
The site was discovered in the 1970s, and red lumps have been found in some of the graves there since 2011. But the study by Dzneladze and her colleagues, published in 2025 in the journal Antiquityis the first to identify the lumps as cinnabar, and it is the first time cinnabar has been scientifically identified in a Late Scythian grave.
Toxic pigment
Cinnabar is highly toxic to humans, although the authors of the new study said the people who used it in first-century Ukraine may not have known that.
In some prehistoric societies, cinnamon was used in the same way as the clay-like pigment ocher (iron oxide) for body painting, cave paintings and rituals. But while ocher is non-toxic, cinnamon causes mercury poisoning, especially when heated and its toxic gases inhaled. Mercury then builds up in the body and can cause tremors, breathing problems and even death, and bones prehistoric people who were often exposed to cinnabar have extremely high levels of mercury.
At Chervony Mayak, cinnamon may also have had other uses, the researchers wrote, including as a cosmetic or slowing decay by resisting bacteria.
Traces of the mineral have been found in only three of the 177 graves at Chervony Mayak; Scythian burials elsewhere do not have the red mineral. However, the researchers believe it may have been overlooked in other Late Scythian graves.
“In archaeological field reports and publications, we often read a small description that ‘red pigment’, ‘a piece of ocher’ or ‘redness’ was found in the burial, (but) without clarification and analysis,” said Dzneladze. “These could be different substances.”
Cosmetic purpose?
All three tombs containing cinnamon at Chervony Mayak hold women, suggesting that the mineral may also have had a cosmetic purpose. Dzneladze said that the grave goods in male and female Scythian graves were different, so “we can attribute to that complex the female set of grave goods.”
“The use of cinnabar also for cosmetic purposes should not be ruled out… Ocher and other mineral dyes were also found in (Late Scythian) female burials in pyxides (vessels), caskets and shells used for storing and diluting cosmetics,” she said.
Kaare Lund Rasmussenprofessor emeritus at the Department of Physics, Chemistry and Pharmacy at the University of Southern Denmark, was not involved in the study, but has researched cinnamon use in medieval Europewhere it was believed to be an effective medical treatment for leprosy and syphilis.
He told LiveScience in an email that cinnamon had been found in earlier prehistoric burials in Europe, so it made sense that the Late Scythian culture would also have used it, perhaps as a pigment.
He added that dyes such as cinnamon and ocher had been found in Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age) graves in Europe up to 15,000 years ago, after the period of intense ice that covered much of northern Europe during the Last Glacial Maximum.
“In Denmark I remember a beautiful grave, a mother and her little child buried together, with the child lying on the wing of a swan – with red ocher spread over them,” he said.
Dzneladze, O., Sikoza, D., Symonenko, O., Polit, B., Czech-Błońska, R., Miśta-Jakubowska, E., & Siuda, R. (2025). Mysterious red: cinnabar from the Chervony Mayak cemetery, Ukraine. Antiquity, 99(406). https://doi.org/10.15184/aqy.2025.32
