On an ancient British settlement near Rushmore, Salisbury / by Pitt Rivers.

  • Augustus Pitt Rivers
Date:
1888
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On an ancient British settlement near Rushmore, Salisbury / by Pitt Rivers. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the Eoman Legions, remain a mystery to us, and afford scope for the widest divergence of opinion. Yet their influence upon the existing population of the country must have been far greater than that of the generations which preceded them. Although the late Celtic art and ornamentation, found sporadi- cally in this country before the Eoman Conquest, shows evidence of much taste and refinement, yet the three centuries of Eoman occupation must be considered virtually to mark the first stages of civilisation in England, and the Briton before and after that period must have been, in many respects, a very different being. Whilst some have represented him as utterly degenerate after the Eomans left, and to have been almost exterminated by the Saxons in the central and eastern part of the country, recent investigation has tended to modify this opinion considerably. There can be no doubt that we had a great and noble inheritance from Eome, and that much of it must have been passed on to us by the Britons who succeeded in inoculating their rude Saxon conquerors with wdiat they had learnt from their old masters. It is even now believed by some that the language of the Eomanised Britons was entirely Latin, and that the Celtic speech had to be reintroduced into Wales by tribes that had lived beyond the area of Eoman influence in the north. Much of this ignorance of the condition of the Britons at this time, arises, no doubt, from the difficulty of identifying their graves. A stone or a bronze age grave can be easily deter- mined by the associated relics, but the Eomans introduced so many auxiliaries and colonists from different parts of the world, that a skeleton found in association with Eoman relics may be that of a native of any part of that wide region over which the Eoman dominion extended. This gives additional interest to the study of the remains of people who inhabited the Wiltshire Downs in the western part of the country, in places that are remote from the Eoman centres, in high and com- paratively barren spots to which the aborigines are likely to have been driven by their conquerors, w'here the probability of finding the remains of the genuine Briton is much greater; and when we find in these places skeletons buried in pits in the villages which they inhabited, surrounded by the relics that they used in life, and the remains of their habitations, this serves still more surely to identify them as Britons; for it is unlikely that the Eomans themselves, or their allies, should have paid so little attention to the remains of their dead as to throw them into pits with refuse, without any of the signs of decent burial. Moreover, we find that those who were buried with any
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