286 ARBOfe LOW. 



were also found an arrow-head of flint,* 2£in.long, a fragment of a basaltic 

 celt,f a small iron brooch, now much corroded, but which had once a 

 stone set in it, and another fragment of iron ; these last Mr. Bateman 

 considers indicate an interment of later date than the one consisting of 

 the burnt bones. 



We cannot visit such a spot as this without allowing our thoughts 

 to travel back to the times when these tumuli and this temple were first 

 erected, and trying, if possible, to learn something of those, our barbarian 

 ancestors, who held their religious worship and their funeral feasts 

 here. Pre-historic times are, as everyone now knows, divided into four 

 great periods, marked off from one another, fairly distinctly, by different 

 races of men, and by the different degrees of civilisation to which each 

 attained. To which of these does Ai-bor Low belong? Not to the oldest 

 or Palaeolithic period, when the British Isles were connected with the 

 Continent, and when man had to struggle for existence against many 

 formidable foes — lions, bears, mammoths, and the rest- -most of which 

 are now extinct. Not to this period, for, as far as evidence goes, the 

 men then paid no more respect to their dead than do the Eskimos of 

 to-day, but left them either unburied or so slightly protected that the 

 bodies soon fell a prey to the prowling hyaenas. 



Long after Palaeolithic man came the Neolithic age, with a great 

 advance in civilisation, the farmers and herdsmen replaced the hunters, 

 the fauna was nearly that of to-day, and our country was an island, or 

 rather group of islands, as now. The Neolithic remains are numerous 

 in Derbyshire, consisting of cairns or barrows and chambered tombs, 

 which were frequently family vaults, and probably represent the huts of 

 the living. In these tombs the bodies were buried in the position of 

 rest during lifetime, i.e., huddled up, as the savage curls himself up for 

 warmth during sleep ; with the bodies were sometimes placed the 

 spolia opima of the field, vessels of food and drink, flint and pyrites for 

 obtaining fire, and implements of flint, weapons and ornaments, for use 

 in the happy hunting-grounds of the blessed. 



The Bronze age follows, and shades into the Later Stone age, as 

 though a wave of conquerors had gradually won their way over the 

 country, or mingled with the earlier inhabitants, and it was these men 

 who introduced, with probably a new faith, the practice of cremation, 

 and, according to Mr. Rooke Pennington, sutteeism, infanticide, the 

 slaughter of slaves and prisoners, and cannibahsm. These people we 

 may easily picture to ourselves : the rich " were clothed in linen or home, 

 spun," others wore skins and adorned their bodies with red and yellow 

 ochre ; " a dagger attached to the girdle in a sheath of wood or leather, 

 and an axe were their constant companions." In the earlier part of the 

 period, to which most of the English burial places are referable, we must 

 remember that bronze was very precious, and had not replaced stone. 



*3in. by 2iin., apparently purposely defaced, little of the original polished surface 

 remains. 



I This was obtained at the re-opening in 1848, together with two teeth of a horse 

 and a molar of some carnivorous animal. 



