ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 363 



the other hand, it is not impossible that the arrangements noted in 

 some long* barrows may indicate an approximation towards the 

 practices characteristic of the round-barrow period, and may, con- 

 sequently, be considered as denoting that these barrows belonged 

 to a later age than others in which no such arrangements have been 

 detected. The great and cardinal difference observable between 

 long barrows lies in their containing burnt or buried bodies. The 

 immense majority of the long barrows in the south of England 

 were erected for inhumation, whilst exactly the reverse of this has 

 been the rule in the Northern Counties. 



We will begin by asking whether there is any reason for sup- 

 posing that the builders of these two kinds of barrows, separated 

 thus in space, were also separated in point of time ? Some weight, 

 though not much, may be laid upon the fact that cremation was, in 

 Great Britain at least, the rule during the Bronze Age, as it is 

 possible to suppose that the practice of cremation was borrowed by 

 the people of the latter part of the Stone Age from the strangers 

 who introduced them to the use of metal. A survey, however, of 

 the records of the ' Steingraber' of Scandinavia, Denmark, Schles- 

 wig-Holstein, and North Germany, such as is given by Weinhold 

 in his ' Todten-Bestattung,' 1859; or in the 24th Bericht of the 

 Schleswig-Holstein-Lauenburg ' Gesellschaft fur Alterthumer ' for 

 1864, will not suggest that time rather than, or even in co-opera- 

 tion with, severance in locality, has had anything to do, neces- 

 sarily, with the causation of this difference. Dr. Anderson 1 , how- 

 ever, appears to think that, in the long cairns of Caithness, burial 

 may have preceded cremation ; and it seems likely that the short 

 cairns, whilst affined to the round barrows by this character of 

 shortness, were at once later in date than, and yet genealogically 

 connected with, the long cairns. And in the short cairns cremation 

 was the rule. Some fragments of pottery, with a thong-pattern, 

 closely similar to, or identical with, that so familiar to us from the 

 round barrows, were found by me in a cremation long barrow 

 near Market Weighton, in the East Riding of Yorkshire ; and the 

 same may be said of some pottery found with leaf-shaped arrow- 

 heads, by Dr. Anderson, in a short cairn in Caithness. This may 

 seem to give some stronger ground for supposing the cremation 

 barrows to have been later in date than the other. Very similarly 



1 «Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot.,' June, 1868, p. 508. 



