THE 

 LONDON, EDINBURGH, and DUBLIN 



PHILOSOPHICAL MAGAZINE 



AND 



JOURNAL OF SCIENCE. 



♦ 



[FOURTH SERIES.] 



NOVEMBER 1866. 



XLII. On Ancient Shell Mounds at St. Andrews. — Part I. 

 By Robert Walker*. 



[With a Plate.] 



SHELL-mounds, since attention was first directed to them by 

 the discoveries of the Danish archaeologists, have been 

 found on several parts of the coast of Scotland; and it would ap- 

 pear that similar mounds have been also observed on the coast of 

 England. Previously to the discovery of shell-mounds, nearly all 

 the knowledge we possessed of the customs of the prehistoric in- 

 habitants of this and other countries had been mainly derived 

 from their tumuli, cairns, cists, &c. In some of these ancient 

 monuments we find a group of large cinerary urns containing 

 calcined bones only, or weapons and ornaments laid by the re- 

 mains of the deceased. Sometimes the small rudely made clay 

 urn is empty, occasionally containing fragments of bone ; scat- 

 tered about are the remains of the funeral feast, and in some 

 cases the relics of the human victims that had been sacrificed to 

 the manes of the dead. In these we recognize the sepulchral 

 customs that characterized the different epochs, and which were 

 perhaps gradually changed from time to time, in accordance with 

 the different phases of civilization and their modifying influence 

 on the savage creed. Whether, however, we regard the different 

 kinds of tumuli and their contents as the remains of the same 

 race, whose ideas on the subject had undergone a change, or con- 

 sider them an evidence of a change of the races themselves, as 

 indeed seems borne out by the crania, they are valuable enough ; 



* Communicated by the Author, having been read before the Literary 

 and Philosophical Society of St. Andrews. 



Phil. Mag. S. 4. Vol. 32. No. 217. Nov. 1866. Y 



