Grave-mounds and their contents : a manual of archaeology, as exemplified in the burials of the Celtic, the Romano-British, and the Anglo-Saxon periods / by Llewellynn Jewitt.

Date:
1870
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Grave-mounds and their contents : a manual of archaeology, as exemplified in the burials of the Celtic, the Romano-British, and the Anglo-Saxon periods / by Llewellynn Jewitt. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh. The original may be consulted at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh.

    37/342 page 7
    The other appellation occasionally used, of twin bar- rows, is further evidence of this—two interments having been made within a short distance of each other, and the mounds raised over them running into and joining each other. It may, however, for purposes of description, and for this alone, be well to retain the names, while discarding much of the theory and of the system which has been at- tempted to be established regarding them. The mounds of earth alluded to, present occasionally highly interesting and curious features, and show that, like those of a different construction, they have frequently been used for successive interments. The section of one of these is shown on the next page. It is one of a group of six barrows on Lord's Down, in the parish of Dewlish, in Dorsetshire. It was eighty-two feet in diameter, and fourteen feet in height in the centre. The primary inter- ment, an urn, was placed in a cist cut in the chalk sub-soil. Over the urn was raised a small cairn of flints, and the cist was then filled in, and raised a little above the surface with chalk rubble. Over this was a layer of earth, upon which an interment had taken place, and in its turn covered with a thick layer of chalk rubble, in the centre of which, in a cist, another interment had again been made. Above this rose another layer of earth, another of chalk, and then a final one of earth, on each of which in- terments had at different periods been made. Thus the tumulus, which was formed of alternate layers of chalk and earth, exhibited no less than six successive sepulchi'al deposits.* The interments were both by inhumation and cremation. Another example of a barrow of this period is shown in section on the fig. 3. There had originally been four * This remarkable barrow was excavated by Mr. Warne, and a fully detailed account given by him in his valuable work, the Celtic An- tiquities of Dorset, from which the illustration is taken.
    digitised image 1
    digitised image 2
    digitised image 3