Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/116

90 Of this population the most interesting relics are perhaps to be found in their graves. A large number of burials both by cremation and inhumation are here described. I have no space to deal with them in detail; but some of their peculiarities, as well as those of some neolithic interments, must be mentioned as being of importance to students of folklore.

A neolithic tumulus, called Wor Barrow, on Handley Down, was excavated and found to contain six skeletons of primary interments, all buried together on the old surface-line. Three of them were in the usual crouching position; but the other three were evidently not buried as corpses, but "put in as bones and not in sequence." How is this to be interpreted? The only other case of bones which may be of neolithic man thus buried occurs in the silting of the Angle Ditch. Seeing, however, that the Angle Ditch is of the Bronze Age, if these relics, which are very imperfect, are neolithic, they must have been found and reburied, or more likely flung into the ditch. Two interments apparently of the Bronze Age are of similar character. They both occur in excavations in the chalk, which General Pitt-Rivers conjectures to have been pit-dwellings. One of these, near South Lodge Camp, consists merely of fragments of two femora and a pelvis. The other, a few feet north-west of the Handley Hill entrenchment, referred to above, consisted of a large number of bones, including the skull, in such a position as showed that they must have been put in as bones, or at least that the body must have been cut up before burial. In the latter case, the bones were not on the floor of any part of the pit, but must have been put in after it was, partially at all events, silted up. Cannibalism is suggested as a possible explanation; but, as the author remarks, "the evidence of it is insufficient." And it can hardly explain two secondary interments of the same character in the ditch of Wor Barrow, if the excavator be right in assigning them to the Roman era. It is well, however, to bear in mind the suggestion that both neolithic and Bronze Age peoples may have occasionally been cannibals, and to look for evidence in opening other graves. This can only be obtained by noting the position and accessories of the skeletons with exhaustive care, such as General Pitt-Rivers adopts. A large proportion of Bronze Age interments are by incineration; and it may well have been that the bodies were first eaten and the bones then burnt. This would not be