

 



EARLY MAN 



be confused with those which are often found amongst the material of 

 the mounds, some of which may have been brought with the material 

 itself, and so be of greater age than the barrow ; while others may have 

 been derived from disturbed secondary interments, or have been casually 

 dropped, and so be of less age than the barrow. 



The following table gives the approximate percentages of Derby- 

 shire Bronze-age interments 1 which have yielded the above accompani- 

 ments : 



Drinking cups ..... with 6'9 per cent of the interments 



Food vases ...... 14*0 



Cinerary urns ..... 22'6 



Incense cups ..... 2-4 



Flint and other stone objects 33-0 



Bronze objects ..... 8'5 



B ne ..... 7' 



Jet and amber objects ... 3-3 



As already intimated, some barrows have been used again and again 

 for burial purposes, and these successive interments sometimes cover a 

 period so long that modes of burial had time to undergo a consider- 

 able change. For this reason, these ' multiple ' barrows are of great 

 interest to the archaeologist, as the superposition of the interments, the 

 displacement of some by others, and the distance that others are away 

 from the central and presumably primary interment, throw much light 

 upon the sequence of the modes and customs. Derbyshire is peculiarly 

 rich in examples to the point, but there is only space here for a few 

 typical ones. 



In a barrow at Parsley Hay, Mr. Bateman found a skeleton in a 

 vault, and immediately above its cover-stones was another accompanied by 

 a bronze knife-dagger and a polished granite axe-hammer." This was a 

 case of simple superposition, in which the older interment was unharmed 

 by the introduction of the later one ; but more frequently it has been 

 otherwise. At Gray Cop near Monsal Dale, for instance, the original 

 interment was that of a woman and child. Subsequently the remains of 

 a cremated body were introduced so deeply in the barrow that the woman's 

 pelvic bones were dispersed and the cremated remains deposited in their 

 place. 3 Sometimes the havoc wrought by the introduction of new 

 interments has been too great to render interpretation easy. At Flax- 

 dale near Youlgreave a fine cinerary urn with its burnt deposit was 

 found in a depression of the rocky floor of a barrow, and to a casual 

 observer this might have been taken for the original interment ; but in 

 its vicinity were a few pieces of bone and pottery that told of a displaced 

 and scattered earlier interment. 4 When there has been a succession of 

 several interments, the result may be exceedingly confusing, and the in- 

 terpretation correspondingly doubtful. 



1 In Messrs. Bateman and Carrington's Staffordshire Bronze-age interments the corresponding ap- 

 proximate percentages were as follows : drinking cups with 5, food vases with 7, cinerary urns with 

 1 3, flint with 44, and bronze with 6 per cent of the interments. 



a Diggings, p. 23. 3 ReSyuary, 1867. * Vestiges, p. 100. 



175 



