Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/312

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103.—Long Barrow at West Kennet (restored by Thurnam).

The Neolithic tribes in Britain buried their dead sometimes in caves which had previously been used by them for dwellings, and sometimes in chambered tombs, which probably represent the huts of the living. Each of these was generally used as a vault common to the family or tribe, and contained skeletons of all ages. The interments are shown to have been successive and not simultaneous, from the bones being in various stages of decay, as well as from the fact that the bodies could not have been crowded together in the space in which the skeletons are found.

The Neolithic tombs consist of barrows or cairns, varying in size, and long, oval, or circular in plan. The more important contain a stone chamber, built of slabs of stone set on edge, and very frequently with a narrow passage leading into it, which was also used for interments after the chamber was filled. The long barrows of Wiltshire, Somerset, and Gloucestershire are the most elaborate in this country; and some, as, for example, that of West Kennet (Fig. 103), are as much as 350 feet long. In this, as may be seen in the restoration by Dr.