616 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



Riitimeyer ^, Welcker 2, and Ecker ^, may be adduced to show that 

 it is by no means always possible to decide the question of the sex 

 of a cranium in the absence of the pelvis and other bones. It is 

 interesting" to remark that a very similar female cranium was found 

 by the Rev. George Cardew in a Romano-British cemetery at 

 Helmingham under circumstances such as that of having the head 

 raised, which makes it probable that the skull may have differed as 

 much ethnologically as it does anatomically from the skulls of the 

 Romanized Celts, amongst whom it, as also another cranium sup- 

 posed not to have been Celtic, was found. This cranium has been 

 presented to the University Museum by the Rev. G. Cardew, and 

 has been carefully measured and compared with other skulls sup- 

 posed or known to have belonged to Anglo-Saxons. Two smallish 

 brachycephalic or sub-brachycephalic and prognathic crania^ one of 

 which belonged to an old (No. xiv. Jan. 15, 1868) and the other to 

 a young woman (No. x. March 17, 1868), and neither of which 

 has any other than osteological evidence attached to it for the 

 decision, I am inclined upon this evidence to think may have been 

 Anglo-Saxons of the type of the two female crania just spoken of. 

 The younger of these two women's skulls was found with the 

 cervical vertebrae impacted between the rami of its lower jaw, and 

 in this, as in many other particulars, resembles the female Anglo- 

 Saxon skull from Brighthampton, to be seen catalogued as No. 

 5,7 1 :j D, in the College of Surgeons. 



Among the entire series, besides some fourteen crania, or parts 

 more or less fragmentary of crania, and other bones, which speak 

 to the existence of a distinct interment without making it possible 

 to refer the remains certainly to a distinct type, there are some 

 four or five crania which bear a considerable resemblance to crania 

 of what is perhaps the most common modern English type. The 

 frontal region, without attaining any very extraordinary develop- 

 ment, or exceeding either in vertical or transverse diameter the 

 frontal regions of the larger specimens of brachycephalic British 

 skulls, is, nevertheless, possessed of more equable proportions 

 relatively to the other regions of the cranium than the great 

 majority of ancient crania ^. And in consequence, to some extent, 



^ 'Crania Helvetica,' pp. 8, 9. 



^ * Archiv fiir Anthropologie,* i. i, p. 127. » Ibid. ii. i, p. no. 



* See Broca, 'Sur la Capacity des Cranes Parisiens,' Bull. Soc. Anth. de Paris, 

 torn. iii. 113, 1862. 



