CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. 



the burials of the men who made the mde flint 

 weapons of the drift and the caves. It has been 

 tacitly assumed that the rock-shelters of Aurignac 

 and Cro Magnon were burial-vaults of the cave- 

 men; but the evidence of their sepulchral char- 

 acter is far from conclusive. We do not yet 

 know how the people of the Danish ' kitchen- 

 midden period ' buried their dead, and the sepul- 

 chral remains of the Swiss lake-dwellers are still 

 undiscovered. This want of evidence for the cor- 

 relation of the sepulchral remains of the different 

 countries with the remains of their earliest habita- 

 tions, leaves it still an open question whether the 

 earliest known sepulchres may not be those of the 

 earliest inhabitants. 



Grave-chambers. 



In primitive times, the idea of inhumation 

 appears to have been unknown. The earliest 

 graves, as a rule, are structural 'houses of the 

 dead.' The natural development of the grave- 

 chamber seems to be from a simple cist or in- 

 closure of great stones, covered with a slab of cor- 

 responding size, to a chamber constructed with 

 walls of single stones set at intervals, and filled in 

 with masonry, roofed either by an enormous block, 

 or by overlapping of the successive courses of 

 stones, to form a rude vault or dome. In the 

 larger chambers, a door-way and passage were 

 necessary' for access, and the whole was usually 

 covered by a heap of stones or earth, often of 

 enormous size. They are known as dolmens, 

 cairns, or barrows, according to the peculiarity 

 of their external form. The dolmen is a chamber 

 formed by immense stones, set in the ground as 



_! 



Fig. 21. Section of a Chambered Cairn, Caithness : 

 a, passage, 25 feet long ; b, chamber, 10 feet high. 



supports to a single covering-stone of enormous 

 size. The cairn is a heap of stones covering 



Fig. 22. Dolmen, ' Kit's Coty House,' Kent 



either a cist or chamber. Sometimes the cairn is 

 round or oval, at other times oblong, and occa- 



sionally there are groups of cists, or several cham- 

 bers in the same cairn. Barrows are mounds of 

 earth heaped over cists or chambers in the same 

 way as cairns. Besides these, there are cisted 

 graves sunk in the earth, and marked by a single 

 tall unhewn pillar-stone, or by two pillar-stones, 

 or occupying the centre of a circle of pillar-stones. 

 The dolmens and the long barrows appear to 

 be the most ancient of the sepulchral monuments, 

 in Britain at least ; but each sepulchral structure 

 must be judged by its own internal evidence, and 

 not by its external form. In England and Wales, 

 as also in Ireland, the dolmens are usually free- 

 standing, or uncovered by a mound, as seen in the 

 preceding engraving ; while in Denmark, France, 

 and Belgium, they are generally buried under 

 mounds of earth. As a rule, they contain only 

 deposits of stone implements and rude pottery. 



Modes of Burial. 



Stone Age. The common form of interment 

 was to place the body in the chamber, unburnt, 

 sometimes in a sitting position ; but burning 

 seems also to have been practised contempo- 

 raneously with unburnt interment. The long 

 barrows of Great Britain, which contain either 

 megalithic cists or chambers, placed in the higher 

 and wider end of the barrow, exemplify this inter- 

 mixture of burnt with unburnt interments. In 

 a large proportion of the long barrows, the skulls 

 are found to have been cleft during life, and the 

 conclusion is, that they are those of victims immo- 

 lated at the funeral of the chief in whose honour 

 the barrow was reared. This custom of killing 

 the wives and slaves, or dependents of the dead, 

 that he might not be unattended in the future 

 existence, is known to have prevailed widely 

 among the ancient heathens. Dolmens are rare 

 in Scotland : long cairns, characterised by a 

 peculiar crescentic expansion at either end, occur 

 in Caithness. 



But while great men were buried with the pomp 

 and circumstance befitting their condition, meaner 

 men appear to have been consigned to a simple 

 cist, often with nothing above-ground to mark 

 their resting-place. Where such cists contain no 

 implements, the mode of interment will some- 

 times be sufficient to determine their age. Un- 

 burnt interment in a short cist, in which the body 

 lies doubled on itself, is the earlier mode. Through- 

 out the Stone Age, burying seems to have been 

 more common than burning. With this class of 



734 



Fig. 23. Food-vessel Urn, 5 inches high. 



unburnt burials in Britain, two forms of urns are 

 associated, which have been termed, from their sup- 

 posed purposes, 'food- vessels' and 'drinking-cups.' 



