ON THE PEOPLE OF THE LONG-BARROW PERIOD. 



passages were available ; but that burial without burning", and also 

 without any cist or chamber whatever, may, in other districts not 

 so conditioned, have been contemporaneous with burial in chambers ; 

 and finally, that inhumation in cists without passages leading down 

 to them, and cremation, mark later epochs in the long-barrow 

 period. The questions are in need of further evidence for their 

 definite solution, and they are beset with numerous difficulties and 

 sources of fallacy. 



Coming, in the third place, to a consideration of the modes of 

 burial observable in long barrows, and the rationale to be given of 

 them, I have to say that one peculiarity appears to me to charac- 

 terise all long barrows, whether they contain burnt or unburnt 

 bodies, and that this peculiarity is, that whether the number of 

 bodies be large or small, they occupy but a relatively small part of 

 the entire tumulus. In other words, the bony remains, burnt or 

 unburnt, are huddled together in short compass, whilst, so far as 

 we see on the first contemplation of their arrangement, they might 

 have been disposed with little or no more trouble at intervals 

 throughout the tumulus. A segment or two of the entire length 

 of the barrow has been employed for the reception, all the rest has 

 been erected for the honour of the dead. In a long barrow near 

 Market Weigh ton, containing some twenty-six burnt skeletons, the 

 whole number were found within a distance of 60 feet from its east 

 end ; of these twenty-six, twenty-one were buried in a segment of 

 32 feet in length, and of these twenty-one, seventeen lay in a length 

 of 17 feet. In another barrow, also of the cremation variety, near 

 Kirkby Stephen, and 179 feet in length, the whole number of 

 burnt bodies amounted only to seven, but they were crowded into 

 a segment of the barrow which was but 3 feet 6 inches wide and 12 

 feet 6 inches in length. A chamber 7 feet by 4 feet, in one of the 

 Gloucestershire barrows, ' Swell vii.,' contained, even after having 

 been exposed to rifling by the rustics of the neighbourhood during a 

 period of many years, remnants of no less than nine adult skeletons. 

 Another receptacle which I examined in another barrow (' Swell vi.') 

 close by, and which I believe -to have been a cist, though, from its 

 having been disturbed, it is a little unsafe to speak quite positively, 

 contained within a space of 5 feet 6 inches by 4 feet, parts of two 

 adult unburnt skeletons, male and female respectively, parts of 

 three children about seven or eight years of age, and the skeleton 



