Smoked ancestors for a pack of smokes | Letters

Your article (How bronze age Britons dragged ancient dead into land disputes, 1 October), reminds me of Norman Lewis, in An Empire of the East, describing his encounter with the stone age culture of the Dani people of Irian Jaya in the early 1990s. "Persons of great power and influence " were not cremated in the usual way but smoked over a slow fire for several months and thereafter hung from the eaves of their houses.

Related: Preservation society: how bronze age Britons mummified the dead