Recent Wiltshire Books, Pamphlets, and Articles. 149 



one of the urns was found a fragment of thin pottery of a unique character, 

 very fine basket-work of grass or rushes covered with a coating of clay. 



A pair of bone tweezers, precisely resembling those in the Stourhead 

 Collection, was found inside one of the urns with the burnt bones, and on 

 the floor of the barrow a fragment of pottery precisely resembling that 

 found by Dr. Thurnam in the chamber of the Long Barrow at WestKennet, 

 now in the Society's Museum, and figured in Archceologia and Lubbock's 

 Prehistoric Times as an example of Neolithic pottery. General Pitt 

 Rivers, however, considers that the finding of this fragment associated with 

 Bronze Age objects leaves the age of the West Kennet specimen open to 

 doubt. A chipped flint hand tool, presumably of Bronze Age date, was 

 found in the ditch of another Round Barrow near Handley. 



From these exhaustive excavations on Handley Down the General deduces 

 the fact that the site was occupied by the people of the Neolithic Period, 

 who built the Long Barrow, the Round Barrows being afterwards erected 

 near it by the Bronze Age People, who occupied a camp or inhabited area 

 on the spot — afterwards it was certainly occupied during the Romano- 

 British period, and the Long Barrow was again used as a place of interment, 

 possibly as the place of public executions. 



On Martin Down, Wilts, a rectangular entrenchment enclosing an area 

 of about two acres, was thus treated : — " The excavation of this camp 

 occupied four months, with from twelve to sixteen men. The whole of it, 

 ditch, rampart, and the greater part of the interior space, was trenched 

 down to the undisturbed chalk. Every fragment of pottery and other relics 

 were collected and ticketed with the depth at which they were found. The 

 classification of the pottery, in accordance with my established system, was 

 very perfect, and no difficulty arose in determining the class to which each 

 fragment belonged. The place being eight miles from my house, I visited 

 it every day, and examined the pottery and relics which had been found in 

 my absence. The pottery was ticketed immediately after it had been washed 

 and identified." The result was that the rampart and the lower silting of 

 the ditch showed enough Bronze Age pottery to make it evident that the 

 entrenchment belonged to that period. From the evidence of this and other 

 Bronze Age camps, as distinguished from inhabited areas of the Romano- 

 British Age, the General believes that pits were not employed for residence 

 in the earlier to the extent that they were in the later period. 



The General draws attention to the great prevalence of common flint-flakes 

 in deposits of Roman Age — though he professes himself unable to suggest 

 any use for these flakes. 



The volume closes with a note on a Romano-British trench found whilst 

 making the nursery gardens at Rushmore, and with an elaborate comparison 

 of certain patterns found on the pottery from the camps with those on that 

 found in the barrows — the chevron and straight line cHaper patterns and 

 oblong punch marks being taken for comparison, and their distribution 

 throughout the world traced. The ornament produced by lines of oblong 

 punch marks is thus shown to be almost confined to the British Isles, and 

 probably to certain deposits of the Bronze Age. 



It is needless to say that the volume is crammed with admirable 



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