IPON THE SERIES OF PREHIST01?IC CUANIA. 689 



Ebberston barrow and the Market Weighton barrow, in which 

 these fractures have been noted, were both of them cremation- 

 barrows, and the action of fire, even when as at Ebberston im- 

 perfect, would be distinctly in favour of making the bones more 

 brittle ; and in these and in the other barrows the great age of the 

 interments, w^hich are undoubtedly of premetallic times, may be 

 taken in part-explanation of the loss of resistance testified to by 

 these fractures. It is remarkable that Dr. Thurnnm (Cran. Brit., 

 pi. 59) should have observed that Hhe perfect skulls from these 

 barrows, inferred to be those of chiefs, are of considerably more 

 elongate type than those which are cleft,' and should have put on 

 record the fact that two of his supposed cleft skulls should have 

 had the frontal suture persistent and have possessed thus a broader 

 and less dolicho- cephalic form,' i. e. have been a better filled and 

 larger skull 'than the rest.' For, as is well known ^ and may be 

 readily verified, better filled and larger skulls differ from smaller 

 ones in having thinner walls and being more fragile ; and to this, 

 and not to any such cause as their having been the skulls of ' serfs 

 of less pure blood than their lords,' a view contra-indicated by their 

 size (p. 640), we may reasonably refer the fact of a large proportion 

 of the broken skulls being broader than the unbroken. 



I have further to remark that fractured surfaces such as those 

 described by Dr. Thurnam, and interpreted by him as indicating 

 slaughter of victims at the funeral of a chief, may be and often are 

 found in skulls of skeletons buried singly and in skulls buried with 

 relics ^, provided that they have been subjected to pressure from the 

 shifting of soil or the downward settling of stones upon them. The 

 first effect of such agencies appears to be the forcing inwards of the 

 basi-cranial bones, a process analogous to that which Dr. Barnard 

 Davis has described as taking place in the senile living body, and 

 which other writers have spoken of as imj)ressio baseos cranii. The 

 second eflPect upon the vault of the skull thus deprived of its basal 

 support may take either the direction of flattening out of the arch 

 or that of compression of it from side to side. Those who are most 

 familiar with the multiform and even grotesque shapes into which 

 skulls thus crushed are distorted, and with the cleanness and sharpness 



* See Weisbach, Schadelfonn der Rumiinen, pp. 8, 12, 30. 



2 For example, the skull already spoken of at p. 596 as ' Rudstone, Ixviii. 7,' had 

 been broken into a very large number of fragments with even and vertical edges, 

 and this though its walls were of gi-eat thickness. But with it the following relics 

 were associated— a bronze knife, a perforated stone axe, a hammer of micaceous grit, 

 and a flint implement. 



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