More Light on Ancient Britain 1

Abstract

IT is gratifying, and at the same time puzzling, to find that the antiquities discovered in part of a single county can provide material for two such voluminous works as Canon Greenwell's “British Barrows” of 1877 and the record of Mr. Mortimer's researches, now issued with the assistance of Mr. Sheppard, the energetic curator of the Hull Municipal Museum. The district investigated lies between York and Bridlington, and teems with relics of the past, most of the barrows, or burial mounds, dating from the Bronze Age, but two or three cemeteries containing Anglo-Saxon graves at least a thousand years later. The excavations in which the author has been concerned for so many years are well described; but those without special knowledge of the period will turn with most satisfaction to the introduction, where, with the aid of copious extracts from the earlier work already mentioned, some interesting generalisations are made from the data furnished by the spade. Evidence is brought forward in favour of cannibalism among the ancient Britons, a practice that has been suspected for some time; and human sacrifice, perhaps also suttee, seems to have been indulged in at the burial of an important personage. In some barrows there were signs that a circular hut or a pit-dwelling had been used as a sepulchre, the walls and roof being thrown down over the body; and the author's suggestion as to the origin of the incomplete ring formed by stones or a trench round many burials of the period is certainly plausible. In his own words, “these rings are probably marks of taboo or enclosures which were made at the beginning of the ceremony to mark off and protect the sacred spot in which the ceremony and interment were afterwards to be conducted, and the break in the circle had no other significance than to serve as a place of ingress and egress during the performance of the obsequies.”