Communities of the dead

Abstract

Burial monuments of the Neolithic and Bronze Age, individual or in cemeteries, were often located in topographically prominent positions, or in zones of concentration that might qualify as ‘sacred landscapes’. In the Iron Age by contrast it is not obvious what governed the choice of location for cemeteries and smaller burial grounds, whether they were sited in relationship to settlement or whether there were traditional locations dedicated to burial. For some of the eastern Yorkshire square-ditched barrow cemeteries Bevan (1999: 137–8) considered proximity to water may have been a factor. Dent (1982: 450) stressed the siting of Arras type barrows and cemeteries adjacent to linear boundaries and trackways, a factor that is very apparent in the linear spread at Wetwang Slack. Though we may distinguish burials that are integrated into settlements from those that are segregated into cemeteries, therefore, there is no implication that cemeteries were remote from settlements. In fact, the contrary is often demonstrably the case. There is some evidence that small cemeteries or burial grounds were located immediately beyond the enclosure earthworks of hillforts. At Maiden Castle, Dorset (Fig. 3.1; Wheeler, 1943), the picture is prejudiced by the dominance of the ‘war cemetery’ in the eastern entrance, but the reality is that there had been a burial ground just outside the ramparts well before the conquest. A possible parallel is Battlesbury, where Mrs Cunnington (1924: 373) recorded the discovery of human skeletons from time to time in a chalk quarry just outside the north-west entrance to the camp. Some of these were contracted inhumations, and apparently included one instance of an adult and child buried together. The attribution of a ‘war cemetery’ (Pugh and Crittall, 1957: 118 evidently refers to this external burial site, which should be distinguished from the burials excavated more than a century earlier by William Cunnington within the hillfort at its north-west end (Colt Hoare, 1812: 69). Iron Age inhumations were also found, just within the rampart circuit, at Grimthorpe in Yorkshire (Mortimer, 1905: 150–2; Stead, 1968: 166–73). One of these was the well-known warrior burial, found in 1868.