Page:Early Man in Britain and His Place in the Tertiary Period.djvu/399

] is found to contain examples of both modes of disposing of the dead. Generally the primary interment is that by inhumation; and the secondary, as in the accompanying Fig. 141, by cremation. In some cases, however, this arrangement is reversed.

If the articles found in the barrows in the above table (p. 346) be examined, it will be seen that the in- habitants of the southern counties, in the Bronze age, were richer and more civilised than those of the midland and of the north. This would inevitably follow from the introduction of the Bronze civilisation from the Continent: the nearest portions of Britain to France must then, as later in the days of Cæsar, have been greatly influenced by contact with the inhabitants of northern Gaul.

The numerous circles of stone or of earth in Britain and Ireland, varying in diameter from 30 or 40 feet up to 1200, are to be viewed as temples standing in the closest possible relation to the burial-places of the dead. The most imposing group of remains of this kind in this country is that of Avebury (Fig. 142), near Devizes, in Wiltshire, referred by Sir John Lubbock to a late stage in the Neolithic or to the beginning of the Bronze period. It consists of a large circle of unworked upright stones 1200 feet in diameter, surrounded by a fosse, which in turn is also surrounded by a rampart of earth. Inside are the remains of two concentric circles of stone, and from the two entrances in the rampart proceeded long avenues flanked by stones, one leading to Beckhampton, and the other to West Kennet, where