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II. 



PUEHISTOEIC CENOTAPHS. Br GEORGE COFFEY, B.E. 



[Read November 11, 1895.] 



Should grave-mounds in which no remains of interment have been 

 found be regarded as cenotaphs, is a subject that has been much dis- 

 cussed. Canon Greenwell rejected the existence of such monuments 

 in his work on British Barrows. He writes : — 



"Barrows are sometimes met with in which, upon examination, 

 no burial appears to have taken place, since no remains of the 

 body are to be discovered. In the greater number of these instances 

 there can be little doubt that, in consequence of the imperfect explo- 

 ration of the mound, the place of burial has been missed, and in other 

 cases that a small deposit of burnt bones or the almost entirely de- 

 cayed bones of an unburnt body have been overlooked. . . . But 

 there are other cases, and such have occurred to myself, when the 

 most careful examination has failed to discover any trace of an inter- 

 ment. These empty barrows have been spoken of as cenotaphs, monu- 

 ments raised to commemorate but not to contain the dead. Mr. Kemble, 

 holding the view that barrows were prepared beforehand, and that, 

 from time to time, bodies were inserted in the mounds so set apart, 

 believed that the barrows where no burials are found had never been 

 used for interment. Neither of these views appears to be a tenable 

 one, and both seem modes of accounting for the absence of burials much 

 too artificial for such a state of society as may be supposed to have 

 existed during the ages when barrow burial was in use in Britain. 

 With every wish to defer to the great practical knowledge of 

 Mr. Kemble, as well as to the skill with which, as a rule, his mind 

 moulded the facts he had accumulated into a consistent and reason- 

 able theory, I cannot but regard this opinion as being both unnatural 

 and out of harmony with the general mass of evidence which the burial 

 mounds a:fford. Nor do I see any difficulty in accounting for the 

 absence of bones or other indications of an interment where a careful 

 examination has shown that such evidence has not been overlooked 

 through a careless or imperfect exploration. In the greater number 



