326 ANNUAL MEETING. 



ture — the knees almost up to their faces, and the hands and arms 

 sometimes crossed, sometimes down and sometimes up. It was a 

 very well-known attitude, and whatever the explanation, was the 

 fashionable one of the period, and of that which preceded it. 

 From the earliest time downward the burials were very sparse — 

 one here, one there, and no particular form of interment was 

 apparently observed. When they came to the neolithic time they 

 found a prevailing fashion of putting their dead into bent 

 positions, as if sitting — laid on one side with knees up to face, 

 with hands crossed or pointing up or down. That was how these 

 bodies had been laid in these slate-lined graves at Harlyn, and 

 even the little children when they died were placed in cists in 

 the same posture, and it appeared they spent as much care and 

 attention on the burial of the child as they did on the burial of 

 the adult. Sometimes the graves were enclosed in four slabs, 

 sometimes they were in a kind of enclosure, and in the case of 

 children, they curled round rather, forming a circular kind of 

 grave, so that the children looked like a cat asleep. In some 

 instances the children were placed at the end of a large grave, 

 sometimes at the side, and in some cases they made a partition in 

 the large grave and put the baby inside the little partition, and 

 the mother apparently in the large apartment. This kind of 

 burial was not confined to the Neolithic age. They buried in the 

 same way down to the Bronze times. It was not the proper way 

 of burying in the Bronze times — when it came to the proper 

 Bronze era they adopted a different method ; they buried the 

 person in an urn, having previously burned the body. Now, at 

 Harlyn, after examining a hundred bodies, they had found no 

 weapon at all. They seemed to have been, therefore, not a war- 

 like tribe. Harlyn meant "On the water." The graveyard to-day 

 was nearer the sea than when in use, for the sea had encroached. 

 On the top of the hill containing the graves large quantities of 

 sand had been blown up by storms, and this, as he had already 

 said, had completely buried the brown hill cemetery. In order 

 to get at it they had had to dig down through the sand and carry 

 it away. This had proved to be very heavy work. They had to 

 remove about 80 tons per day for six weeks. In all they had 

 carried away about 2,000 tons of sand to get at the graves. 

 Then thev had to clear the surfa-ce of the brown hiU of the sand 



