50 INTRODUCTION. 



It may be asked, if the ordinary barrows are none of them the 

 burial-places of the people who occupied the country during the 

 highest developement of the bronze period, where do their burial- 

 places exist? The question certainly is one which it is not possible 

 to answer ; but the inability to oifer any explanation is not suffi- 

 cient to ma's-e us, in the face of what appear to be greater difficul- 

 ties, accept the view that the barrows belong to that time. There 

 are other periods during which the people must have been buried 

 in large numbers, and yet there is scarcely a trace left of their 

 sepulchral remains. For instance, the time which elapsed between 

 the introduction of iron and the full occupation of Britain by the 

 Romans was by no means a short one, and yet the burials which 

 can be attributed to that period are but few\ 



It has been stated already that various implements of flint are 

 found in the barrows, both associated with interments and dis- 

 persed casually amongst the materials of which the mounds are 

 composed. There is a fact connected with these implements and 

 of some interest in itself, which becomes of importance from the 

 evidence it affords in relation to the cause of such articles being 

 deposited with the dead. Those implements of flint which are 

 found placed in immediate connection with the body appear in 

 most instances to be perfectly new, and as if made for the burial, 

 whilst those found in the material of the barrows and not associated 

 with an interment have, as a rule, been evidently in use ; some of 

 them^ indeed, showing abundant signs of having answered their 

 purpose for a lengthened time. Bronze implements, on the con- 



^ The Arras and Hessleskew gi'oup of ban-ows, opened by the Rev. Edw. W. Stillinfj- 

 fleet in 1816-7, contained several that belonged to the time in question, as also did 

 at least two baiTows at Cowlam, described in the sequel [Nos. 1, li]. A grave 

 discovered in 1868, at Grinithorpe, on the western verge of the wold-range, and where 

 in close proximity two or three other graves were met with, afforded a fine series of 

 articles belonging to the early iron age. An account of the grave and its contents, 

 with engi'avings, is given in the Reliquary, vol. ix. p. 180, by Mr. J. R. Mortimer, 

 of Driffield, and another by Mr. Llewellyn Jewitt in Grave Mounds, in both of which 

 however, and no doubt by an oversight, it is described as an Anglo-Saxon burial. 

 Just beyond the range of the wolds, and not very far from where the last-mentioned 

 graves were found, at a place called Bugthorpe, a body was discovered with whidi an 

 iron sword in a bronze sheath and an enamelled bronze brooch were associated. Another 

 interment of the same period, with some beautifully enamelled bronze articles, was 

 found at Barlaston, in Staffordshire. Jewitt, Grave Mounds, p. 258, where again it is 

 wrongly called Anglo-Saxon. Another burial was discovered with enamelled bronzes 

 similar to those at Barlaston, in 1788, on Middleton Moor, Derbyshire. These few 

 burials appear to comprise all that have been recorded of those belonging to the early 

 iron age. Others have no doubt been met with, but it is not likely that many have 

 been overlooked, for the nature of the articles buried with the dead in that class of 

 interments is of a kind likelv to command attention. 



