ETHNOGRAPHICAL SURVEY OF THE UNITED KINGDOM. 515 



Archaeologists have paid too exclusive attention to the mateiial 

 remains. They have forgotten to inquire what light may be thrown 

 upon them by tradition. By the term tradition I do not mean simply 

 what the people say about the monuments. Antiquaries soon found out 

 that that was always inaccurate, and often utterly false and misleading. 

 Hence thay have been too much inclined to despise all traditions. But 

 tradition in the wide sense of the ivlbole body of the lore of the uneducated, 

 their customs as well as their beliefs, their doings as well as their sayings, 

 has proved, when scientifically studied, of the greatest value for the 

 explanation of much that we must fail to understand in the material 

 remains of antiquity. To take a very simple instance : when we find in 

 Gloucestershire barrows, cups, or bowls of rough pottery buried with the 

 dead, we call them food- vessels, because we know that it is the custom 

 among savage and barbarous nations to bury food with the dead and to 

 make offerings at the tomb, and that this custom rests on a persuasion 

 that the dead continue to need food and that they will be propitiated by 

 gifts ; and we further infer that the races who buried food- vessels with 

 their dead in this country held a similar opinion. Or, to take another 

 burial custom : General Pitt-Rivers reported last year to the British As- 

 sociation that he had found in excavations at Cranborne Chase bodies 

 buried without the head. If we were ignorant of the practices of other 

 races we should be at a loss to account for such interments. As it is, we 

 ask ourselves whether these bodies are those of strangers whose heads have 

 been sent back to their own land, or their own tribe, in order to be united 

 in one general cemetery with their own people ; or whether the heads 

 were cut off and preserved by their immediate relatives and brought into 

 the circle at their festive gatherings to share the periodical solemnities of 

 the clan. Both these are savage modes of dealing with the dead, one of 

 which, indeed, left traces in Roman civilisation at its highest development. 

 The knowledge of them puts us upon inquiry as to other burials of the 

 prehistoric inhabitants of this country, which may help us in reconstruct- 

 ing their worship and their creed. I for one do not despair of recovering, 

 by careful comparison of the relics preserved to us in the ancient monu- 

 ments with the folklore of the existing peasantry and of races in other 

 parts of the earth, at least the outlines of the beliefs of our remote 

 predecessors. 



Any such conclusions, however, must be founded on the essential unity 

 that science has, during the last thirty years, unveiled to us in human 

 thought and human institutions. This unity has disguised itself in forms 

 as diverse as the nationalities of men. And when we have succeeded in 

 piecing together the skeleton of our predecessors' civilisation, material and 

 intellectual, we are confronted by the further inquiries : What were the 

 specific distinctions of their culture ? and How was it influenced by those 

 of their neighbours or of their conquerors 1 This is a question only to be 

 determined, if at all, by the examination of the folklore of the country. 

 We may assume that the physical measurements, descriptions, and por- 

 traits of the present inhabitants will establish our relationship to some of 

 the peoples whose remains we find beneath our feet. And it will be 

 reasonable to believe that, though there has been a communication from 

 other peoples of their traditions, yet that the broad foundation of our folk- 

 lore is derived from our foreathers and predecessors in our own land. In 

 Gloucestershire itself we have strong evidence of the persistence of tradi- 

 tion. Bisley Church is said to have been originally intended to be built 



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