FORM OF HEAD. 129 



ornamentation, the sepulchral vases show a wonderful resemblance 

 throughout the whole United Kingdom. The weapons, imple- 

 ments, and ornaments also bear clear testimony to the same 

 fiict ; nor is this identity one which could have been produced 

 merely by human brains and human hands operating upon a 

 common material and for a common purpose, w^hilst living 

 imder very similar circumstances^ and being in much the same 

 conditions of progress and cultivation. On the contrary, they 

 show such an individuality in form and manufacture, as well as 

 in the style of the ornamentation and the way in which it has 

 been applied, as to imply not only a near race-connection, as 

 manifested in the processes of mental developement and by a well- 

 defined idiosyncrasy in respect of art application, but also an 

 intercourse both constant and continued. 



We seem to learn from this very remarkable identity, w^hich 

 appeajs to characterise both the people themselves and their 

 productions, that, although there might be in some parts an 

 intruding population, and in others the remains of an earlier one, 

 the main body of the inhabitants of Britain at the time of 

 the use of round barrow burial, before the introduction of iron, 

 was of a markedly brachy-ccphalic type. At the same time it 

 must not be overlooked, that in the Early Iron Age, so far 

 at least as the limited number of interments which have been 

 discovered and noticed enable us to judge, the skull-form seems 

 to have been dolicho-cephalic. This condition may have been 

 brought about, and probably was, by the fact that the in- 

 truding round-headed people, smaller as they may have been in 

 number, were gradually absorbed by the earlier and more numerous 

 race whom, by force of one advantage or another, they had overcome. 

 This subdued long-headed people may very possibly, in the earlier 

 times of the conquest, have been kept in a servile condition, and 

 therefore were not interred in the barrows, the place of sepulture 

 reserved for the ruling race by whom they were held in subjection, 

 and hence the numerical superiority of brachy-cephalic heads in the 

 barrows. But as time went on and intermixture between the two 

 peoples became common, a change would gradually take place in 

 the racial characteristics, until at length the features of the more 

 numerous body, that is to say the dolicho-cephalic, would become 

 the predominant type of the united people. 



What appears to have occurred in Britain may be further 

 illustrated by what has taken place within historic times in 



K 



