£84 Inaugural Address by the President of the Society, 



water, showing that the water-line must have lain somewhat higher 

 in the hill in former days than is the case at present. 



Woodcuts, or rather a portion of it, was surrounded by an en- 

 trenchment of slight relief, the ditch of which drained into the road 

 drain, above-mentioned ; and at Rotherley a portion of the village 

 was separated from the rest by a circular surrounding ditch, similar 

 to others which have been several times noticed in British villages 

 elsewhere, and which have been rather rashly assumed to be sacred 

 circles, but no confirmation of this was produced by the excavations 

 —-the circle, on the contrary, appeared to have been occupied in the 

 same manner as the rest of the village. In Woodcuts three hypo- 

 causts of T-shaped plan were found, which were probably British 

 imitations of Roman liypocausts for warming rooms by flues beneath 

 the floors. This, at least, is the most probable use to which they 

 can be assigned. A precisely similar one will afterwards be spoken 

 of at Woodyates. The houses must have been built of dab-and- wattle, 

 and, by means of some of the fragments of plaster, which had been 

 hardened by fire, and upon which the impression of the twigs had 

 been preserved, it was possible to ascertain the exact thickness of 

 the walls and the construction of the wattle- work. Timber was 

 also used in the construction of the houses, as appears probable from 

 the large number of iron nails, of a size suitable for fastening beams 

 of wood, and also from a number of cramps of the kind now used for 

 fastening timber together. Besides the dab-and-wattle-work houses, 

 which were probably round, some other houses must have been made 

 with flat sides, plastered and painted. These better class of houses 

 were peculiar to one quarter in Woodcuts, which from the quality 

 of the other objects found in it appears likely to have been a rich 

 quarter. The pits were probably used to contain refuse, and after 

 being filled up to the top were subsequently used for the interment 

 of the dead. The dead were not interred in these pits only, but 

 also in the drains, after they had been filled up to the top with earth, 

 a practice which, if not confined to this district, has, at any rate, 

 not been found elsewhere to such an extent as to lead to the inference 

 that it was a widely-spread British custom. It was a custom that 

 is highly favourable to anthropological research, as the skeletons 



