The Mound-builders of Dunstable

Abstract

AT a meeting of the Royal Anthropological Institute, held on November 8, Dr. W. H. R. Rivers, president, in the chair, Prof. G. Elliot Smith and Capt. Guy Crowden read a paper on “The Mound Builders of Dunstable.” After describing the results of excavations on one of the Five Knolls on Dunstable Downs, in which the remains of three cremated bodies were interred, probably in the Bronze age, the, authors directed attention to the association of the tumuli with cultivation terraces, huts, and ancient roads, and suggested that the presence of flint suitable for implement making was the determining cause of the settlement of the people who built the huts and made the cultivation terraces on the Dunstable Downs. The convergence of the main roadways at this spot is also to be explained by the transport of the most valuable economic product of the Neolithic— and even also of the Bronze—age to places where such material could not be obtained locally. Attention was directed to the geographical distribution of cultivation terraces in Britain, and their remarkable association in so many places with the edge of the chalk; and the attempt was made to correlate these facts with the observations of Mr. W. J. Perry as to the causal relationship between the distribution of the megalithic monuments of Wiltshire, etc., and the flint-bearing edge of the same chalk zone further south. The plea was made for the fuller investigation of the relationship existing between ancient monuments and geological formations that produced substances valued by man in ancient times, and also for the investigation of the effects of the admixture of cultures revealed in the round barrows in different parts of the country.