684 GENERAL REMARKS 



I will now pass from the consideration of trie skulls as found in 

 a more or less perfect condition, or at least in one which has 

 admitted of their being, partially at least, restored, to a considera- 

 tion of certain conclusions which have been based upon the appear- 

 ances presented by the fragments into which the prehistoric skulls 

 are, so often and so unfortunately, found to be broken. 



Dr. Thurnam has in several memoirs 1 argued from the appear- 

 ances presented by the breakages observable in the skulls from 

 long barrows to the existence of the practice of human sacrifice 

 upon the occasion of the interment of the chiefs in the stone age. 

 We have a large mass of literary evidence in favour of the con- 

 tinuation of this practice into historical times amongst the Gauls 

 and other foreign races with whom the Romans and Greeks came 

 into contact. The story of the funeral of Patroclus preserves for 



1 As regards the literature of the supposed discovery of skulls cleft ante mortem, 

 the following references may be given : 



Mr. Cunnington in 1801 (Ancient Wilts, Sir R. C. Hoare, i. 87, tit. Thurnam, 

 Archseologia, xxxviii. p. 420) found in a long barrow near Heytesbury, called Bowl's 

 Barrow, a number of skeletons crowded together at the east end, the skull of one of 

 which appeared to have been cut in two by a sword. 



Sir R. C. Hoare writing in 1817, Archseologia, xix. p. 48, says, ' Only one or two 

 instances have occurred where we have found any defect or pressure on the skull, 

 indicating a mortal wound : but in one of the barrows near Stonehenge, we dug up 

 a skull which appeared to have been cut in two by some very sharp instrument, and 

 as nicely as any instrument of Savigny could have effected. This skull was reiuterred 

 in the same barrow.' A Round Barrow, Tumulus 36, Ancient Wilts, p. 163. 



Dr. Thurnam, writing in 1855 in the Crania Britannica, pi. 24, Littleton Drew, 

 says (p. 3) of the fragments of a skull, that ' the fractured edges were very sharp, 

 suggesting the idea of having been cleft during life/ Writing in the Archseologia, 

 xxxviii. 1860, of the long barrow at West Kennet, Wiltshire, Dr. Thurnam dwelt at 

 greater length upon this subject, saying that the occurrence of such cleft skulls was 

 curious and had ' an important bearing on the estimate to be formed of the general 

 grade of civilisation of those who must be regarded as our remote ancestors/ His 

 views were still further developed in the Memoirs of the London Anthropological 

 Society, 1865, as also in the Journal of the Archaeological Institute of the same year, 

 vol. xxii. p. 107, in which he describes the appearances presented by the Ebberston 

 skulls now in the Museum of this University. In the Crania Britannica, pi. 59, Dr. 

 Thurnam, in his account of the skulls from the chambered long barrow at Rodmarton 

 in Gloucestershire, examined by Canon Lysons in 1863 (see Proc. Soc. Ant., N. S. ii. 

 p. 275, or his work, ' Our British Ancestors,' p. 137, 1865), describes and figures from 

 that barrow a skull now in this Museum as an example of a skull cleft ante mortem ; 

 remarking (p. 4, note) that another of these supposed cleft skulls, from West Kennet, 

 was like the Rodmarton specimen in having the frontal suture open, whilst the un- 

 injured skulls were of a considerably more elongate type. Finally, in the Archseologia 

 for 1869, vol. 42, pp. 185-188, we have the evidence as to human sacrifices restated 

 with many references, and we have also appended to it the allied subject of anthro- 

 pophagism; at p. 227 we have the Rodmarton skull, now before me as I write, 

 figured ; and the author states that the chambered barrows of Nympsfield and Charlton 

 Abbots are the only instances of such barrows examined by him in which traces of 

 violent cleavage of cranial bones had not been found. 



