What you don’t find in soils! Today our team(Prof. Sabine Fiedler, George Janzen, together with Prof. Sabine Hornung, Saarland University) was at the LandesMuseum Bonn to sample five skulls from the Celtic period. The background to the study is the assumption that at least one of them is a severed head. So-called “têtes coupées” could come from defeated opponents and were an expression of the Celtic head cult, which is why such a find would not be unusual in this context. Heads were often embalmed with the help of resins and tars, which would lead to the introduction of corresponding terpenoid markers into the bone material. We will perform a lipid extraction on the collected powders and analyze the extracts by GC-MS to test for the presence of these markers.