The Archaeology of Britain: An introduction from ... - waughfamily.ca

The Neolithic period
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time. From the Middle Neolithic, more frequent single burials, under small mounds or in small
enclosures, are encountered in certain regions. At Radley (Oxfordshire), a man and a woman
were buried flexed in a pit within a ditched rectangle, which may have bounded a low barrow;
they were accompanied by a shale or jet belt-slider and a partially polished flint knife respectively
(Bradley 1992) (Figure 4.2). Other pre-Beaker Late Neolithic single burials include the successive
inhumations within a deep grave pit, which was capped by a round barrow, at Duggleby Howe,
Yorkshire (Kinnes 1979). Beaker funerary rites thus continued existing indigenous practice.
Cremations are found throughout the Neolithic, from within the Etton causewayed enclosure to
the first phase of Stonehenge.
Human remains occur in other contexts, including the ditches and pits of causewayed
enclosures, and later in henges. The excavated 20 per cent of the inner ditch of the Hambledon
Hill causewayed enclosure, for example, revealed the remains of some 70 people. These were
incomplete, including skulls lacking lower jaws and one truncated torso. The dead may have been
exposed, or buried then excarnated, before being redeposited in significant places or circulated
among the living, as tokens of indissoluble links with their ancestors.
Something of this kind permeated the use of long barrows and chambered tombs. Rites were
very varied, and funerals as such formed only part of them. In some, perhaps many, instances
they certainly began with fleshed, recognizable individuals: witness the complete skeleton of an
adult man inside the entrance of the north passage of Hazleton (Saville 1990). In others, corpses
may, after initial treatments as discussed, only secondarily have been redeposited singly or together
within the monuments (Whittle 1991). The end result was collective deposits of varying size,
generally comprising the disarticulated and skeletally incomplete remains of a few or tens of
people (and exceptionally more, as at Quanterness on Orkney). Monuments may not have been
final resting places for all these remains. Some of the incompleteness (for example, too few skulls
and longbones) may be accounted for by their successors’ circulation through and movements
from such monuments (Thomas 1991). In some instances, the emphasis seems to have been on
the accumulation, perhaps by successive rites and depositions, of an anonymous mass of
intermingled white bone, representing the collectivity of the ancestors. In others, for example in
transepted chambered tombs in the Cotswold-Severn area, as at West Kennet long barrow (Figure
4.3), or some of the Orcadian stalled cairns, including Midhowe, attention was certainly given to
the placing of individual remains. At West Kennet, the basis of arrangement seems to have been
gender and age: males in the end chamber; a predominance of adult males and females in the
inner pair of opposed chambers; and principally the old and young in the outer pair (Thomas
1991).
The structures in which these remains were temporarily or permanently stored may have
stood for other ideas and associations than with the ancestral dead alone; some had only token
human deposits or none at all (Bradley 1993). The terminology that has traditionally labelled
them ‘tombs’ or ‘graves’ is unhelpful.
All these monuments comprise a mound, cairn or platform, either housing or supporting
roofed structures of wood or stone. The actual constructions from region to region and indeed
within regions were very varied. Portal dolmens around the Irish Sea had large, stone, box-like
chambers, some surrounded by low stone platforms. Court cairns in Ireland, and Clyde cairns in
western Scotland, in essence elaborate this form, with larger cairns and divided chambers. Stone
chambers set in the ends and sides of long barrows and long cairns occur in many areas, from
southern England to the north of Scotland. Round cairns were a mainly northern form, with
some in the west and some round barrows in Yorkshire. Many internal chambers or structures
were single, and approached directly from outside the monument. In other instances, there was a
connecting passage, with the chamber housed well within the mound. Internal spatial complexity