614 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



itself to me is that the part of the burial-ground which has 

 fallen under my inspection may have been used by preference, 

 though by no means exclusively, for male interments. The hypo- 

 thesis of a battle is excluded by several considerations, and notably 

 by that of the age of the skeletons. 



Of the thirty-five skeletons assigned by me to the female sex, 

 thirteen were of aged, and no less than nineteen of young, women. 

 The great dangers of child-birth may be supposed to be indicated 

 by these figures, and the osteophytic intracranial growths ^ so often 

 observed in the puerperal state, and noted here in four cases, may 

 point in the same direction. Under the head of children I have 

 reckoned all persons below the age of thirteen or fourteen. The 

 numbers of this class, viz. twenty-eighty which I have identified, 

 holds a much smaller proportion to the whole number, 123, than 

 we should expect from modern statistics. But the greater perish- 

 ability of children's bones, and the lesser depths of their graves, 

 which, if not more chemically, is yet mechanically more dangerous 

 to their preservation, must be borne in mind in considering these 

 figures, and should prevent us from basing any argument upon 

 them over-hastily. Still, we may perhaps be justified in thinking 

 that there could not have been at Frilford, even in days when 

 glazed windows and coal were as little used as China-ware and 

 'China drink,' that great infantile mortality which, by weeding 

 out all the weakly in early life, produces a population of adults 

 with a great proportion of aged individuals. 



The Anglo-Saxon remains which I have procured from Frilford 

 have suffered much from the mechanical and chemical agencies to 

 which the shallowness of their graves, and, secondly, the shallow- 

 ness of the soil, exposed them ; and the youth of their owners has 

 still further rendered them amenable to these destructive and 

 distorting forces. But_, thanks to the reconstructive ability of Mr. 

 Charles Robertson, I have been enabled to see that the two types 

 of crania which have been shown by Dr. Barnard Davis to have 

 been found with Anglo-Saxon insignia, both at Long Wittenham 2, 

 and at Linton, in Cambridgeshire ^, co- existed side by side in the 



^ Rokitansky, 'Path. Anat,,' Sydenham Soc. Trans, iii. 208; Bock, ' Pathologie,' 

 p. 209. 



^ See * Archaeologia,' xxxviii. No. 107, 770 k. Oxford Univ. Museum. 



2 See * Crania Britannica/ Dec. 4, pi. xlvi. Two other crania of this * platycephalic ' 



