422 ANIMAL REMAINS FOUND AT CISSBURY. 



the rubble, in such a manner, that is to say, as to show that they 

 had all come down tog-ether, that the human body must, in the 

 singularly illustrative words of the Hebrew prophet, have l ' gone 

 down to the stones of the pit,' with * the carcases trodden under 

 foot' of the lower animals above specified. I am not clear that any 

 evidence is now procurable for deciding whether the woman ' went 

 down alive into the pit ' or not ; there can be no doubt that her 

 whole body, dead or alive, soft parts as well as bony, went down in 

 its natural continuity. And it seems to me that the peculiarities 

 of the collection of lower animal bones appear to necessitate the 

 hypothesis of a rubbish heap having been accumulated close to the 

 open mouth of this shaft, which rubbish heap must somehow or 

 other have been precipitated simultaneously with a large quantity 

 of rubble (from, possibly, shaft K, PL xv.) and the human body 

 into the 'skeleton shaft.' It is of course easy to suppose that 

 this was done by violence, and was an act of foul play. But it 

 is also possible that a rash step on a mass of rubbish and rubble 

 in frosty weather may have caused an avalanche-like descent 

 of the entire mass of half-eaten bones, of rubble, and the living 

 woman. 



It may be objected, perhaps, that even a set of savages would 

 scarcely have their dwelling-place and their rubbish so near so 

 dangerous a thing as an open pit. To this it may be answered, 

 firstly, that an examination of the pit showed that it had actually 

 been allowed to stand open for some time at all events, a red seam 

 of silting having had time to form itself at a lower level in the 

 shaft than that at which the woman's skull was found, to say 

 nothing of the snails, and of the weathering of the walls to which 

 they were attached ; and, secondly, that modern experience shows 

 only too abundantly that very dangerous and life-destroying 

 nuisances are often allowed to exist very near human dwelling- 

 places. I have, indeed, sometimes thought that the proximity of 

 the pit may have been thought desirable by the formers of the 

 rubbish heap, as it may have been used as a sort of protective 

 pitfall, affording something of security against marauders. If the 

 woman, whose skeleton I shall now proceed to describe, can be 

 supposed to have fallen into the pit whilst prowling round the hut 

 which the rubbish heap implies, we can understand how it was that 



1 Isaiah xiv. 19. 



