EARLY MAN
be confused with those which are often found amongst the material of the mounds, some of which may have been brought with the material itself, and so be of greater age than the barrow; while others may have been derived from disturbed secondary interments, or have been casually dropped, and so be of less age than the barrow.
The following table gives the approximate percentages of Derbyshire Bronze-age interments[1] which have yielded the above accompaniments:
Drinking cups ..... with 6'9 per cent of the interments Food vases ...... 14*0 Cinerary urns ..... 22'6 Incense cups ..... 2-4 Flint and other stone objects 33-0 Bronze objects ..... 8'5 B ne ..... 7' Jet and amber objects ... 3-3
As already intimated, some barrows have been used again and again for burial purposes, and these successive interments sometimes cover a period so long that modes of burial had time to undergo a considerable change. For this reason, these 'multiple' barrows are of great interest to the archaeologist, as the superposition of the interments, the displacement of some by others, and the distance that others are away from the central and presumably primary interment, throw much light upon the sequence of the modes and customs. Derbyshire is peculiarly rich in examples to the point, but there is only space here for a few typical ones.
In a barrow at Parsley Hay, Mr. Bateman found a skeleton in a vault, and immediately above its cover-stones was another accompanied by a bronze knife-dagger and a polished granite axe-hammer.[2] This was a case of simple superposition, in which the older interment was unharmed by the introduction of the later one; but more frequently it has been otherwise. At Gray Cop near Monsal Dale, for instance, the original interment was that of a woman and child. Subsequently the remains of a cremated body were introduced so deeply in the barrow that the woman's pelvic bones were dispersed and the cremated remains deposited in their place.[3] Sometimes the havoc wrought by the introduction of new interments has been too great to render interpretation easy. At Flaxdale near Youlgreave a fine cinerary urn with its burnt deposit was found in a depression of the rocky floor of a barrow, and to a casual observer this might have been taken for the original interment; but in its vicinity were a few pieces of bone and pottery that told of a displaced and scattered earlier interment.[4] When there has been a succession of several interments, the result may be exceedingly confusing, and the interpretation correspondingly doubtful.
- ↑ In Messrs. Bateman and Carrington's Staffordshire Bronze-age interments the corresponding approximate percentages were as follows: drinking cups with 5, food vases with 7, cinerary urns with 13, flint with 44, and bronze with 6 per cent of the interments.
- ↑ Diggings, p. 23.
- ↑ Reliquary, 1867.
- ↑ Vestiges, p. 100.
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