Sepulchral Monuments

 Sepulchral Monuments 

In 1975 I excavated a Dorset Barrow, in which i uncovered no bones, no pottery, no urn, no skeleton, no cremation,  nothing!

In 2020, when I had leisure for research, I read every learned article or excavation report that I could find that might tell me if I was unlucky, or if the empty Barrow was a common problem. 

I was looking for definite evidence that any barrow had been built with intent to bury a body in it.

One great example of this was Sutton Hoo, the ship burial ,but this and other similar monuments are quite late in historic time.

I looked at simple earthworks of bronze age or earlier, looking for evidence that when someone died in prehistory a team of folk went out onto the landscape of a territory that they felt at home in, dug a hole, buried their relative, and built a Barrow on top of them.

I found nothing like that, but I did find lots of burials of bodies and urns, haphazardly inserted into existing earthworks. 

I also found other reports suggesting that many barrows were completely devoid of inhumations of any sort.

Having scored a blank on barrows, I turned my attention to cairns to see if these had been built to house the dead,or could they have had a more realistic purpose. 

Here again the results were confused.

Yes! Skeletons were found in Cairns, though not in all cairns, and those cairns with Skeletons or human bones in them, not buried in any way  by human agency tended to date to 3000BC or before.

Animal bones with signs that they had been prepared for eating appear in the middle of the 3rd millennium BC, and human bones, or cremations purposely buried tended to date to mid-3rd millennium BC onwards.

To me none of this explains why cairns were constructed in the first place, and I think they were built with the intent that they would perform an important function in the Neolithic world. 

Jeffery Nicholls 



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