EARLY MAN IN SCOTLAND 139 



removal of their owners, had been lost sight of. In many 

 instances these weapons and implements are elegant in 

 design, show great mechanical ability in their construction, 

 and are ornamented with much taste and skill. Instances 

 also are not uncommon in which objects of bronze are found 

 in the sepulchres of the period. 



In the study of the Bronze Age in Scotland a want is 

 experienced similar to that felt in a review of the Neolithic 

 period. There are no buildings which can be distinctly re- 

 garded as dwelling-places for the men of this time. With 

 them, however, as in the polished Stone Age, there is evidence 

 of the mode in which they disposed of their dead friends and 

 relatives. Interments which there are good grounds for 

 associating with these people have been exposed in the 

 formation of roads and railways, and in agricultural opera- 

 tions. Where the surface of the ground has not been culti- 

 vated or otherwise disturbed, in almost every county tumuli, 

 mounds, hillocks, and cairns occur, the exploration of which 

 has in many cases yielded interesting results. In no instance, 

 however, have chambered cairns, divided into compartments, 

 and possessing an entrance passage, been found associated 

 with articles made of bronze. The sepulchral arrangements 

 of the period possessed a greater simplicity than is shown in 

 the chambered cairn. 



The interments in the Bronze Age were sometimes that 

 of a single individual in a knoll or mound, or under a cairn 

 artificially constructed, and now overgrown with grass, 

 heather, and whin bushes, or, as is not uncommon, in the 

 collection of sand or gravel near the sea shore, or on a river 

 bank, or in the moraine of some long-vanished glacier. At 

 other times, in similar localities, two to six interments had 

 been made as if in a family burying-ground. At others the 

 interments were much more numerous, and represented, 

 doubtless, the cemetery of a tribe or clan ; one of the best 

 known of these was observed some years ago at Law Park, 

 near St. Andrews, in which about twenty interments were 

 recognised. In another at Alloa, twenty-two separate inter- 

 ments were exposed. Quite recently, immediately to the 

 east of Edinburgh, in the districts now known as Inveresk 



O ' 



and Musselburgh, not less than fifty interments of this 



