»39 



the Cambridge-road, a Romano-British urn, containinjj bones was 

 found a few years since, and with urns from the Lewes and Ditchling- 

 roads, might be seen in the Brighton Museum. 



It was, therefore, not to be wondered at, that building operations 

 on an extensive scale to the north of the town — as are about to be 

 commenced jusl beyond the Viaduct, on the ground laid out by Mr. 

 .Mdcrman Ireland and Mr. Councillor W. Wallace Savage— that they 

 should bring to light proofs that at a far distant day Romans and 

 Britons lived and died and buried their dead in what till recently was 

 but so much land given over to cultivation, and deemed, except in this 

 respect, virgin land. It was now some three weeks since workmen in 

 the employ of Messrs. Ireland and Savage, who were engaged in 

 digging flints, came upon what seemed holes fi^ll of flints and broken 

 pieces of chalk, extending some 6ft. or 7ft. down to the Coombe 

 rock. These pits, which had evidently been excavated and filled in, 

 yielded about three times the number of flints, and these not rolled 

 ones, as the ordinary diggings produced. One day an almost perfect 

 skeleton of a man was found, at about three feet deep below the sur- 

 face, and then the idea gained ground that they had come upon a 

 graveyard, and that these excavated and filled in pits were graves. 

 Nov>'^ it was a well known fact that in some countries, at the present 

 day, savage man, to protect the bodies of his departed friends, and to 

 prevent the v.ild animals and especially the hyaenas from tearing up and 

 devouring the bodies, filled in the grave not with earth, but with stones. 



The bones of this body were more or less in a vciy friable condi- 

 tion ; the skuil, when first found, was nearly perfect, and the teeth, the 

 part of the human and animal frame to last the longest, were well pre- 

 served. This and the bones of another skeleton, for the portions of 

 two human jawbones in the Museum evidently belonged to different 

 people, were what is called secondar)- burials, i.e., the interment had 

 been made in a grave already occupied. There was this peculiarity 

 with the teeth of one ja^v, viz., molars, canir.cs, and incisors are all 

 ground flat on their crowns, showing that the teeth were what is called 

 edge to edge bite, or were ground flat by the nature of the food. 



Tl'.cse remains threw no light upon the date of the secondary 

 bniial. It might be remarked that the almost perfect skeleton was 

 lying with its feet to the east and its head to the west. 



At a lower cepth, and resting on the Coombe rock, particles of 



