oi(i Procerdinfi^ of fhe Roj/nl Irish Acificthfi. 



quarried. The use of sandstone in places where a heavy weight had to be 

 sustained is also an indication of architectural forethought and design. 



That no metal objects were found may be accounted for on the ground 

 of economy, bronze being too valuable to waste on tomb-deposits. The 

 implements found with greatest frequency were pointed tools of bone or stone, 

 sometimes perforated at the butt, and pegs or pins of boiie with expanding 

 heads. Similar objects are characteristic of the contemporaneous interments 

 at Loughcrew. Possibly these pins had been used to fasten the bag of cloth 

 into which the ashes from the funeral pyre were collected. 



With regard to the religious ideas of the people, the first point to indicate 

 is the great importance attached by them to sepultm-e. This is evidenced 

 first by the extraordinary pains taken in the construction of the monuments; 

 and, secondly, by the commanding sites chosen for them. The latter point is 

 capable of two explanations, between which it is impossible to choose. It was 

 intended either that the deceased tribesmen should overlook as wide an area 

 of the clan teiTitory as possible, or that the monuments themselves should be 

 a centre upon which eyes could be turned from the remotest limits of the 

 lands of the tribe. 



The well-established fact that cremation and inhumation co-existed in the 

 Bronze Age once more receives an illustration. For, while certain isolated 

 unburnt bones might have escaped the fire accidentally, this cannot be said of 

 the nearly complete skeletons found in the narrow passage of H, and in the 

 cist of 0. Burning e\'idently took place outside the earn, and the ashes were 

 then placed either in an um or (more frequently) on a flat stone — in the latter 

 case possibly wrapped in a cloth — and then laid inside the chamber : as a rule, 

 in the side cellae. 



Once again we find evidence of the well-known, though inexplicable, 

 custom of burying white stones with the deceased. Not only inside the earns 

 but even inside the piles of stones covering the chamber were found numerous 

 lumps of calcite, much rolled, which there is every reason to believe had been 

 brought from a considerable distance. One remarkable collection of about a 

 dozen of these stones lay just outside the doorway of K. Pebbles of white 

 quartz, also foreign to the distiict, were likewise found. One of the rounded 

 stones found in F was bored by the moUusk Scacicava riiffosa. This and the 

 shell of Xcdiai catena from Cam H show that the people of the community 

 penetrated as far as the sea-shore lq their search for objects of religious or 

 3«schetic value. 



There seems every reason to assign a ritual purpose to the two ox vertebrae 

 deposited in specific places in Cam F, especially when we bear in mind the 

 sanctity attached tu the ox hi early religioucs, and when we consider that in the 



