Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 4, 1893.djvu/247

 REVIEW.

any apology were necessary for bringing under the notice of the readers of a work of the national importance of General Pitt-Rivers' Excavations, it would be found in the fact that the first two volumes were reviewed in the earlier series of this periodical, when it was known as The Archæological Review. There a general outline was given of the results of the excavation of two Romano-British villages on the author's property at Granborne Chase, and of an ancient camp on Winkelbury Hill. The main interest of the two former volumes undoubtedly consisted in the remarkable discoveries at Cranborne Chase. The two villages, called Woodcuts and Rotherley from the modern names of their sites, were occupied during Roman times by a people of dwarfs, who seem to have lived an agricultural and pastoral life, but whose poverty had been touched with a slight gleam of the luxury of their conquerors. Of their material civilisation the relics told something. The pottery, the bronze and other personal ornaments, the knives and spoons, the nails, the keys, locks, hinges, horse-shoes, and other articles of iron, the quern-stones, whetstones, flints—all told their tale. But of the mental and religious attainments, of the worship and the social rites and intercourse of these strange, forgotten villagers we learned absolutely nothing. No altars,