The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The Earlier Bronze Age
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clearance cairns produced by removing stones from fields (at Shaugh Moor, Dartmoor) rather
than formal structures; round barrows come in many shapes, such as bowl, bell, disc and pond
(Figure 5.8); burials may be multiple within the same grave (Goldington, Bedfordshire); cremations
may be placed within pots, by the side of pots or underneath upturned pots; the mounds may
have anything between none and three circular ditches cut around them; mounds may be
constructed of subsoil or stone or solely of turf (the King Barrows at Stonehenge, Wiltshire);
some mounds have stake circles; and the inhumed corpses may be orientated in a number of
different directions. Some of these variations are chronological (there was a broad change from
inhumation to cremation after 2000 BC), others are procedural (Beaker primary burials often
have the head to the north, whereas
sec-ondaries may equally be
orientated to the south), and others
still are regional, such as the wide
variety of barrow forms largely
confined to the Wessex area. In
Scotland, the occurrence of slablined
graves, termed short cists,
beneath mounds or cairns, is
common. Whilst barrows normally
contain burials, certain mounds
(such as the Lockington barrow in
Leicestershire) have none at all.
Human bones excavated from the
Trent at Langford
(Nottinghamshire), dated to 2250–
2100 BC, and skulls dredged from
the Thames suggest that deposition
in water was a common rite.
With only the final resting place
of the dead available to us, what can
be gleaned of the sequence of
events that made up the funerary
rites of passage is problematic
(Figure 5.9). Yet certain fortuitous
and extraordinary deposits may have
important and interesting
implications. Underneath an
upturned pot under a barrow at
Winterslow G3 in Wiltshire were a
bronze razor and a small pile of
eyebrow hair (Barrett 1994, 123),
Figure 5.9 The sequence of funerary events at Hemp Knoll barrow, Wiltshire:
the corpse and grave goods are placed in a treetrunk coffin (A) which may
have been covered and lowered into the grave (B), which was backfilled to
include an ox head and hooves (either an oxhide cloak or a head-and-hooves
offering), an antler pick and charcoal.
Source: Barrett 1994
suggesting that mourners may have shaved their facial hair as a rite of passage and an act of
purification. At Irthlingborough near Raunds in Northamptonshire (Figure 5.10a), buried in
alluvial mud, the top of a mound preserved the remains of 184 cattle skulls and smaller
numbers of cattle mandibles, shoulder blades and pelves. Most of them were from animals
aged around 2 years, probably bullocks. Such numbers can only have derived either from an
enormous herd or, more likely, from many different herds, the funerary gifts of many different
communities attending the funeral from all over the region (Davis and Payne 1993). The jet