ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND AT CTSSBURY. 419 



IV. The mollusca found in the Skeleton Pit and their bearing on 



its date. 



The mollusca found in the Skeleton Pit, though they do not 

 throw any light upon the habits, furnish an almost perfect de- 

 monstration of the relative antiquities of the pit-diggers, of the 

 woman whose remains were found in the pit, and of the diggers of 

 the ditch who came last of all, little suspecting what ' mouldered 

 there below.' 



The following species of mollusca were found in the pit, adhering 

 to its walls, or amongst the rubble -.—Helix nemoralis, Helix arbus- 

 lorum, Helix lapicida, Helix rotundata, Zonites cellarius, Cyelodoma 

 elegans. They were found in great abundance, but there is no 

 reason to suppose that they had been used for food. There were no 

 specimens of the large edible snail, Helix pomatia, found in Cissbury 

 at all, and though the next largest English snail, Helix aspersa, 

 was found in other parts of the works excavated, I have no note of 

 it from the skeleton pit. Oysters which (see Colonel Lane Fox, 

 1. c <$6y) were found in one instance at the bottom of the ditch, 

 were not found in any stratum deeper down, and may, therefore, 

 like the horse, be considered as marking a later age. To under- 

 stand the value of the argument for the antiquity of the shaft and 

 the priority in point of time of the entombment of the woman, 

 whose remains are hereinafter described, to the digging of the 

 ditch, Colonel Lane Fox's section (fig. 3, PL xv, 1. c.) of the skeleton 

 shaft, with the ditch escarp and counterscarp, should be before the 

 reader and be compared with his description given at p. 376, 1. c, of 

 the structural arrangements there figured. In the skeleton shaft 

 (H, fig. 3, PI. xv.) the larger snail shells, by themselves, are suffi- 

 cient to show, firstly, that the ditch must have been cut through 

 rubble continuous with that which we cleared out of the pit, to 

 the great surprise, no doubt, as also to the great satisfaction of the 

 excavators, who would find the work of cutting through rubble 

 much easier than that of cutting through the natural chalk ; and 

 by consequence, secondly, that the shaft was anterior, not posterior, 

 in date to the making of the fort. For it is simply impossible 

 that such large shells as those specified could have worked their 

 way in any abundance through the red seam of silting, made up of 

 fine rain-washed particles, which marked the line of the bottom, 



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