PARISH OF UPPER SWELL, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. 533 



of that gallery near the exterior. In the deposit thus found ex- 

 ternally to the grave itself, parts of two skeletons were found, one 

 of which had belonged to a very powerful man, the other to a very 

 feeble subject. As the presence of bones in the gallery leading 

 into the grave may furnish some clue to the method, if not of the 

 primary introduction of the bones into the grave, still to that of 

 their remaniement, it may be well to specify some of the very large 

 number, no less than 207 in all, which it contained. In this gal- 

 lery then there were found three human clavicles, all of exceeding 

 feebleness, and one badly reunited after fracture ; a distally injured 

 and exostotic radius, a similarly conditioned fibula ; two anchylosed 

 cervical and some other vertebrae from a very aged subject; three 

 patellae, two ossa calcis and other foot bones. All however admitted 

 of being referred to one or other of the two skeletons represented 

 by the two skulls Nos. 5 and 8, found in the grave at the W.N.W. 

 end into which this passage o]3ened ; and there is consequently no 

 reason to suppose that they are anything else than parts of those two 

 skeletons, disturbed possibly to make room for another skeleton which 

 may even have held the same place at this end as skeleton ' No. 3 ' 

 did at the other end of the trench. This however is but conjecture : 

 a survey of the entire collection of bones, from one end of the trans- 

 verse zone to the other, does, I think, help us to making a tolerably 

 certain conclusion as to the way in which they came to have the 

 arrangement we observed. Taking all the bones of whatever kind 

 which we took out of this primary interment, amounting in all to 

 very many hundreds, and arranging them, after they had been 

 labelled according to the position they had occupied, on a long 

 table, so as to be able easily to compare one set of bones with 

 another, and avoid thus the risks of either underrating or over- 

 rating the number of bodies represented, I was able to show that 

 the lower jaws alone gave evidence of the presence in the series of 

 four more adult skeletons than did the reconstructed calvarise. 

 Similarly it was clear that there were more long bones, humeri, 

 femora, and tibia, than could be assigned to so few as ten adults. 

 And these numbers seem to me to prove that the ' Ossuary Theory,' a 

 theory in accordance with which the bodies found in non-cremation 

 long barrows were deposited in them at one time and not succes- 

 sively, and consequently must have been stored or stacked away 

 somewhere else till a sufficient number were available for such dis- 

 posal of them, does not apply to this barrow, as I was^ once inclined 



* See Journal of the Anthropological Institute, vol. v. p. 137, Oct. 1875. 



