Page:VCH Bedfordshire 1.djvu/212

 A HISTORY OF BEDFORDSHIRE THE BRONZE AGE The later Celtic Aryans or Celtae were a tall race, the males averaging in height 5 ft. 8| in., and the women were also tall. The skulls of the Celts were broad or round, as seen from above, with strongly developed brow ridges and powerful jaws. Their houses were bee-hive huts, of stone where procurable ; else- where, as in Bedfordshire, the houses were of hewn planks and clay, roofed with straw or fern. Pottery was made, but the potter's wheel was unknown. Dyers used dyes of various colours. The trades of the bronze- smith and bronze-founder were introduced. The husbandmen used sickles of bronze. A vast number of bronze articles were imported, and others Fig. 59. were made in southern Britain where civilization was higher than in the north and the midlands. The people of the bronze age usually disposed of their dead by burning, but as bronze age customs progressed very slowly it is not un- common to find evidences of cremation and inhumation in one and the same round tumulus. Sometimes a central and older interment of a tumu- lus may represent inhumation, and subsequent interments round the circum- ference represent cremation, or cremations and inhumations may occur side by side round the circumference. In a cremation burial the small pieces of burnt bone were carefully collected and placed in a cinerary urn, which was then buried in the tumulus. In several instances on Dunstable Downs mere holes have been dug in the chalk near the circumference of the 168