•[22 INTRODUCTION. 



barrows upon the wolds, so different in their appearance and 

 construction, as to sug-gest at once, without any farther investiga- 

 tion of their contents, that they belong- to different periods of time, 

 and the probability tbat they are the burial-places of different 

 peoples. The one is eminently a long mound, the other is circular 

 in its outline ; the former being the grave-hills of a markedly 

 dolielio-cephalic (long-headed) people, the latter producing skulls 

 both dolicho-cephalic and brachy-cephalic (round-headed). The 

 lono- barrows and the skull which is found in them are so fully 

 described in the detailed account of that class of mounds contained 

 in this volume, that it is unnecessiry to enter upon any 

 consideration of them in this place. Nor do I propose to give 

 anything more than a very brief notice of the skulls from the round 

 barrows, as the whole subject is thoroughly discussed by Professor 

 Eolleston in the valuable and exhaustive essay with which he has 

 enriched this voUime. 



The round barrows, then, contain two very distinct forms of 

 skull, a long and a round one, together with other less characteristic 

 forms which may be supposed to have belonged to people who were 

 descended from inter-marriages between persons whose heads were of 

 the two different types in question. The dolicho-cephalic head of 

 the round barrows does not differ from the dolicho-cephalic head 

 of the long barrows. It would appear from this, that if, as there is 

 every reason to believe is the case, the long barrows are the burial- 

 places of the oldest occupants of the wolds (at all events in 

 neolithic times '), the long-headed people of the round barrows are 

 the representatives of those persons who buried in the earlier 

 long-shaped mounds. This people was probably intruded upon 

 and conquered by the more powerfully made round-headed folk, 

 who, as is nearly always found to be the case, would in course 

 of time become intermixed with them, and with whom in the end 

 they would become identified as one people. This appears to be the 



^ There is no evidence that the wolds were peopled in palajolithio times; none 

 of the flint implements of the drift, so characteristic in their shape, have been dis- 

 covered there, nor indeed in any other pai-t of Yorkshire. Eemains of the fauna of 

 the period, during which in other districts of England man was the contemporary of 

 the mammoth and other extinct mammals, have been met with on the very bordei-s of 

 the wolds at Bridlington, and at Bielbecks, near Market Weighton ; they have also 

 occun-ed elsewhere in the county, but up to the present time, with the exception of 

 two doubtful flints from Bridlington, no trace of man has been found. At the same 

 time it by no means follows that man did not live in Yorkshire with the mammoth, 

 and it is quite possible that abundant proof of such a com]ianionship may yet be 

 discovered. 



