Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/383

] were occasionally erected, where such material abounded loose on the surface, or could be procured in the neighbourhood without quarrying. These duns or stone forts were always put together without cement, but they are more of a military than a domestic nature. In the circle of these forts, both stone and earthen, there existed chambers and galleries which probably served as granaries or places of security for the preservation of valuables, and to which the young and weak might resort in cases of invasion, or any sudden attack."

Caves were rarely used in the Bronze age as habitations. That at Heathery Burn contained a large assortment of bronze articles, enumerated above (p. 347), with the remains of the Celtic short-horn and other animals. Two human skulls, discovered at the same time, are referred by Prof. Huxley to the long-headed Iberic type, described in the last chapter. Bronze implements of the late Bronze age have been discovered in three other caves in this country,—in the Cat Hole in Cower, in Thor's Cave in Staffordshire, and in Cave Dale, Castleton.

In attempting to picture to ourselves the men of the Bronze age in Britain, it is necessary to make use of articles sometimes isolated, sometimes accumulated together in hoards, and at others buried with the dead. We will first of all deal with their personal appearance, and then pass on to a consideration of their mode of life.

The rich and the chiefs were clothed in linen, or in woollen homespun, fragments of which have been discovered by the Rev. W. Greenwell in the Scale-house