Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 10, 1899.djvu/118

92 arising from poverty or carelessness. And I may be allowed to suggest that the degradation of the rite would be facilitated if pottery in ordinary use were adopted for burial purposes, and to this extent the practice of burying fragments may perhaps be held to strengthen the probability that the urns were not made specially for burials.

I have only space to refer to one other problem connected with the barrows. In the chalk floor of barrow No. 24 "were found three cavities, of which two appeared by their size to be graves for inhumation interments. No bones were found in them, but the digit of a small ox, well preserved, at the bottom, and one small fragment of No. 1 quality of British pottery. The graves were 3.8 feet and 4 feet deep respectively. They were filled with chalk rubble at the bottom and mould at the top. These graves may have been opened, but no trace of such opening could be seen in the superficial mould or turf. The other cavity was near the causeway [across the surrounding ditch], about 6 feet long and 3 feet wide, of irregular depth, and its intention could not be clearly ascertained. Nothing was found in it" (p. 147). Just above one of the first two cavities eight fragments of British pottery were found, and elsewhere within the mound another of the same quality and a flint scraper. Around the barrow, chiefly on the western side, in holes in the chalk, were found fifty-two cremated interments, and to the north an empty oblong grave, as if intended for inhumation.

Now these cremated interments look as though they were secondary, the remains of persons buried near, but not in the barrow, perhaps relatives or dependants of the person or persons for whom the barrow was designed. But if so, why are there no human remains within the barrow itself? A small mound like a barrow, near Handley Hill cross-roads, also contained no human bones, but a number of fragments of pottery, chiefly Romano-British, some flint-flakes, fragments of sandstone (a not infrequent find in a barrow), and seashore or tertiary pebbles, besides some fragments of iron pyrites, and other objects of modern date or apparently accidental.

Some ten or twelve years earlier General Pitt-Rivers had excavated in Scrubitty Copse, Handley, three barrows of the Bronze Age, destitute of human bones. One of them contained an urn inverted over nothing. Another covered a deposit of charcoal,