By Mr. Cunnington, F.G.S. 



113 



Thurnam in the following 1 passage from " Crania Britannica." 

 Speaking of human teeth from a chambered long barrow at Uley, 

 Gloucestershire , he says : — "The worn surfaces of the teeth are not flat 

 and horizontal, but slope away obliquely. . . . The lower teeth are 

 much worn on the outer, and the upper on their inner edges. The 

 condition is altogether such as we must attribute to a rude people 

 subsisting in great measure on the products of the chase and other 

 animal food — ill-provided with implements for its division, and 

 bestowing little care on its preparation — rather than to an agri- 

 cultural tribe living chiefly on corn and fruits. In Anglo-Saxon 

 crania, though the crowns of the teeth are much reduced by attrition, 

 the worn surfaces are for the most part remarkably horizontal/' 

 There are instances, such as the skull from Winterbourne Stoke 

 long barrow, which Dr. Thurnam describes as having the teeth " all 

 present, beautifully white, and with scarcely a trace of erosion on their 

 crowns." He further says : — " It is probably that of a young chief 

 whose diet principally consisted of milk and flesh, which Caesar tells 

 us was in his time still the food of the Britons of the interior." 1 

 But it must be noted that this was " the skull of a young chief," 

 to whose honour, it is supposed, the barrow was raised. Very 

 different would be the circumstances of the unfortunates — the de- 

 pendants or slaves, who were slaughtered at the burial of the great 

 chiefs. As in the case of the victims from Bowl's Barrow, and in 

 the instance from Uley, as cited above, the people generally must 

 have been subject to great hardships, and their food was probably 

 of the coarsest kind. 



It has been remarked by Canon Greenwell that " All the races 

 of men, in their tedious march towards civilization, must have 

 passed through the stage of cannibalism." He considers that in 

 the disjointed, cleft, and broken conditions of many of the bones 

 in long barrows we have indications of funereal feasts, where slaves, 

 captives, &c., were slain and eaten. Bowl's Barrow affords no ex- 

 ception to the broken and disjointed condition of the bones, but 

 much of the breakage must have been due to the ponderous stones 



1 Memoirs Anthrop. S t oc, Lond., I., 144. 

 VOL. XXIV. — NO. LXX. I 



