Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/117

Rh inconsistent with what we know of savage customs. But were the Bronze Age people precisely savages?

Some of the secondary interments in Wor Barrow offered another problem. Two skeletons were buried side by side in the ditch, about 16 inches below the surface, without heads, and one of them without feet. On the top of the barrow, three skeletons were found buried close together, two of them 1.2 foot beneath the surface, and the third 6 inches lower. The skulls of the last and one of the others were found as if they had been buried touching the fingers of the left hand. The remaining skull was in its right place; and this body was in a contracted, half-crouching position. All four of the others referred to were buried extended. Nothing was found with any of the skeletons, except, in the ditch, a flint scraper, and, about 6 inches above the lowest of the three bodies on the top of the barrow, a fragment of Red Samian pottery. The presence of both these was probably accidental. The skeletons themselves cannot, from their proximity to the surface, be older than Roman times. General Pitt-Rivers conjectures that the barrow, which must have been a prominent object in the landscape, was, at that period, used as a place of execution. Some countenance is lent to this conjecture by another skeleton, buried extended some 3 feet down in the ditch, the head of which was turned down on the side, as if the neck had been stretched by hanging.

Among the problems relating to interments of the Bronze Age in Britain is the question whether the urns containing the ashes of cremated burials were in common use, or specially made for the purpose. The excavations detailed in the present volume throw little light on this; but such as they do throw is favourable to the former supposition. At the bottom of the ditch of South Lodge Camp, unconnected with any interment, was found a large urn of coarse pottery with grains of coarse flint or quartz in its composition; and a smaller one of the same quality was found at the bottom of the Angle Ditch. Both were of the kind used for cremated ashes. General Pitt-Rivers remarks upon them: "It is more probable that the urn would be found in the ditch thrown away as refuse, if it was in ordinary use, than if it were only fabricated for ceremonial purposes." Many cremated burials of this age are found associated not with entire urns but simply with fragments. This would seem a debased form of burial