622 EXCAVATIONS IN AN ANCIENT 



look at the other side. The lower jaw in the former of the two 

 skulls is very well formed ; in the latter it is comparatively feeble, 

 especially in the region of the chin ; the teeth in both are less worn 

 than the age testified to by the rest of their skeletons would have 

 led us to expect. The occupiers of these coffins were both tall 

 men ; the stature of the man found with the coins must have been 

 nearly five feet eleven inches, that of the other nearly six feet. A 

 skeleton of an old man, the skull of which closely resembles that of 

 the former of these (see 'Catalogue,' infra, No. xiv. May 1867), 

 and which bears less ambiguous marks of its owner having been a 

 warrior in the gaping, though healed, wound on its left side, be- 

 longed, as its femur of I9'5 inches length shows, to a man of fully 

 six feet in height. The stature of each of these three warriors was 

 much above that of the average Roman of ancient days, who spoke 

 of the Germanic and Celtic races as possessing immania ac procera 

 corpora, as it is also above that of his modern Italian representative \ 

 and above that of the Long-barrow British skeletons ^. The better 

 food of civilization may have increased the stature of the former of 

 the two occupiers of the leaden coffins, and of the owner of the 

 beautifully elegant and vaulted cranium (No. xiv. May 1867); 

 whilst intercrossing would account for the increase in height in the 

 skeleton to which the flatter skull belonged, if, with Edwards, 

 Cardinal Wiseman ^, Sandifort, and Ecker, we should consider it to 

 be probably Roman. 



The craniography of the occupiers of the graves which I have 

 spoken of as Romano-British or British, and which the archaeo- 

 logical evidence above adduced shows to have belonged to the 

 times of the later Roman empire, is a subject of considerably greater 

 difficulty than that of the Anglo-Saxon and of the leaden coffin 

 interments. An examination of fifty-three of these interments, and 

 a comparison, carried on at great cost of time, of their contents 

 with those of several other cemeteries, has conducted me to the 

 following conclusions as to the tribal characters of the pre-Saxon 

 inhabitants of this district with whom I have had to deal. In the 



* See Edwards, ' Des Caractferes Physiologiques des Races Humaines,' p. 53. See 

 Keysler, I.e. p. 220, for the stature of the ancient races under comparison, ibique 

 citata. 



^ See Thurnam, op. cit, pp. 40-41. 



^ 'Lectures on the Connexion between Science and Revealed Religion,' p. 152, cit. 

 Nott and Gliddon, 'Indigenous Races,' pp. 311, 312. 



