596 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



very evident that air and moisture had very free access even to the 

 bottom of these graves, and consequently we should not be justified 

 in arguing from the want now in many of these graves of any traces 

 of such perishable materials as the wood and metal- work of a coffin, 

 to the conclusion that no coffin had been put into them 1400 years 

 ago. The wonder, indeed, is not so much that such substances 

 should in some instances and in such circumstances have vanished, 

 as that they should in any have persisted to the present day. Still 

 I am inclined to think that evidence is not wanting to show that 

 in some cases the Romano-Britons, like other races in ancient, 

 mediaeval, and modern times, interred their dead sometimes with, 

 sometimes without, coffins. This evidence lies mainly in the fact 

 that in some cases a large stone has been found so near the head as 

 to render it difficult to think any coffin, however thin its walls, can 

 have been interposed between the stone and the body. (See Cata- 

 logue, xv^, Sept. 2,6, 1868; xvii^, Sept. 2,6 , 1868.) But even in 

 these interments, where coffins may not have been employed, and 

 which consequently so far resemble the Anglo-Saxon burials by 

 inhumation shortly to be described, three important and easily 

 recognisable differentiating peculiarities are present. First, stones 

 do not appear to have been placed by the Romano-Britons under 

 the head of the corpse, as they were placed in Anglo-Saxon inter- 

 ments, and consequently we do not find in the former, as we do in 

 the latter so very commonly, the cervical vertebrae impacted along 

 the base of the skull from the occipital foramen up to the symphysis 

 of the jaw. Neither do the Romano-Britons, at least at Frilford, 

 appear to have set stones along the sides of their graves, as the 

 Anglo-Saxons did. Thirdly, the Romano -British graves, when 

 recognised as such, in contradistinction to the Anglo-Saxon inter- 

 ments, by the help of these external peculiarities, are found to con- 

 trast with them in a point of even greater, as it is of more intrinsic, 

 interest, viz., in the very large proportion of aged skeletons which 

 they contain. The male Anglo-Saxon skeletons are invariably, or 

 all but invariably, the skeletons of young men : quite the reverse 

 is the case with the Romano-British. To this point, as resting 

 upon anatomical evidence, I shall have to revert in the second part 

 of my paper ; it is sufficient here to say that the difference is just 

 what would be observed now between the cemetery of a settled 

 civilized Christian village and that of an outlying station on the 



