Ancient Britain and the Invasions of Julius Caesar. T. Rice Holmes
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of domestic animals, deer, and wild boars which have been found in scores of barrows, and most of which had been pounded for the extraction of the marrow, were doubtless in many cases the remains of the food upon which the survivors had feasted, but perhaps also of food offered to the dead.852 It is possible too that the burnt bones which are sometimes mixed with cremated human bones may be the remains of animals sacrificed at the funeral, and may represent the custom, described by Homer853 and Caesar,854 of slaying animals of which the dead had been fond and burning them on the funeral pile;855 and when we are told that the skulls of oxen were carefully interred in several barrows and that a horse was buried near the summit of a barrow in Wiltshire above a cremated interment,856 we are tempted to accept a similar explanation. We can understand why implements and weapons were often placed inside urns along with the burnt bones;857 but it would be vain to ask why a cow’s tooth was frequently placed in juxtaposition with a corpse;858 and who would venture to account for the presence of the burnt bones of a fox inside an urn in a barrow on Ridgeway Hill in Dorsetshire, of the skeleton of a mole and the bones of mice in an urn in Glamorganshire, or of the skeleton of a hog in a cist in a Staffordshire barrow?859 We can only suppose that these mysterious deposits had some religious meaning.
But whether animals were sacrificed or not, there can hardly be a doubt of the prevalence of human sacrifice. It has been pointed out that several bodies were frequently interred in one barrow at the same time; that in some cases a man and a woman were laid in one grave or in adjoining graves of the same date; and that in a barrow overlooking the valley of the Derwent a woman was buried with a man whose head her hands clasped, while his legs were above hers and his right hand upon her hip; and of these facts one finds it difficult to suggest any explanation save that of sacrifice or of suicide.860 The innumerable potsherds which lay scattered in many barrows when they were first opened, and the minute flint chips with which cinerary urns were sometimes crammed861 remind one of the words in Hamlet:—
For charitable prayers Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her,
though we should be mistaken if we supposed that in the Bronze Age such offerings were made in the spirit which animated the ‘churlish priest’ who grudged decent burial to Ophelia.862
A distinguished archaeologist has argued that not only in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean but also in Gaul and Britain inhumation and cremation were associated with different conceptions of a future life; the ghost of the body which was interred being regarded as tenanting the grave, whereas, when cremation was practised, the soul was supposed to take flight to Hades or to some far land, though it could not enter the confines until the body which it had quitted was duly burned.863 But whatever the Mycenaeans and the Greeks may have believed, there is no reason to suppose that in the West cremation was attended with any such doctrinal change. We have seen that both in the Neolithic Age and after, cremation and inhumation were practised contemporaneously and sometimes even in the same grave;864 and recent excavations have shown that in the caves of Mentone, even in the Old Stone Age, the two modes of sepulture were in use.865 If the Celts of the Early Iron Age believed that ‘on the burning of the body the soul departed to a distant region’, there is no proof that their belief was different when they laid the body in the grave; and who will maintain that the religious ideas of the Gauls were revolutionized when in the second century before Christ cremation once more became the rule, or that among the Britons of Caesar’s time cremation and inhumation, which had each their votaries, were the outward signs of religious beliefs that were utterly unlike?866
Engraved stones.
We may perhaps hope to find other clues to the religious ideas of the Bronze Age in megalithic monuments and in the engraved stones which have been already mentioned.867 There are certain designs upon the latter of which the meaning is evident. The figure of an axe graven on a cist at Kilmartin in Argyllshire has many analogues on dolmens in the Morbihan and on the walls of artificial sepulchral grottoes in the department of the Marne; and, as the axe in the Mycenaean Age was a symbol of Zeus, we may suppose that such engravings represented a widespread cult of one of the most fruitful of human inventions, which originated in neolithic times, and survived in the manufacture of miniature celts to serve as pendants and, still later, in the use of stone celts as amulets.868 The most common devices, however, are small circular depressions, called cup-markings, and concentric circles; while occasionally groups of concentric circles are united by grooves. Cup and ring markings are found on the stones of cists, on standing stones, on boulders, and on rocks in most parts of Scotland, in Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire, in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Man, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Dorsetshire, and Cornwall, and likewise in Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Scandinavia, Asia, Africa, and America.869 Natural cup-markings have been noticed on the covering-stones of certain dolmens;870 and it may be that such stones were deemed lucky and that, when they could not be obtained, they were imitated; but of those which are artificial the significance remains unknown.871 The rings may perhaps in some instances be symbolical of sun-worship, for on the cairn of Lough Crew in Ireland and in Scandinavia a few have rays;872 and since we find them on the covering-stones of cists, while in Australia similar designs, drawn on rocks, are magical or sacred,873 it would seem probable that they had some religious meaning.874 Sun-worship undoubtedly prevailed Sun-worship. in certain parts of the British Isles. A few years ago there was found in Zeeland a gold-plated bronze disk, engraved with concentric circles and mounted on a miniature car with the model of a horse attached, which was recognized by all archaeologists as a votive object, connected with the worship of the sun. Similar disks, two of which are ornamented with a cruciform pattern—a well-known solar symbol—have been exhumed in Ireland, and a fragment of one in a barrow near Bath.875 Besides the spirals which have been already mentioned, the most remarkable of all the rock-carvings is a swastika on a rock near Ilkley, identical with one which has been discovered in Sweden, not far north of Gothenburg: the oldest known examples of this mystical figure come from the second city that was built upon the site of Troy.876
Stone circles and other megalithic monuments.
We have seen that many barrows and cairns were immediately surrounded by, or enclosed, rings of standing stones which were part of the sepulchral structure. It is now time to consider the larger stone circles and other megalithic monuments which have occasioned voluminous controversies. They were not invented in the Bronze Age; for, as we have seen,877 some of the long barrows were surrounded by peristaliths: the famous circle of Callernish in the island of Lewis contains a chambered cairn, from which it is structurally distinct;878 and some of our circles which are apparently non-sepulchral may have been set up in transitional times. But the development of the circle, which can be traced most clearly in Scotland, was gradual. In the chambered cairns and chambered long barrows the peristalith as a rule was merely an adjunct: in many unchambered cairns and round barrows the stone setting is still a subordinate part of the whole; but, gradually separating itself, it became the leading feature of the monument, while the central cairn or barrow frequently disappeared, and was replaced by a simple cist.879 By similar stages the encircling trenches and banks in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire became distinct from the small disk barrows which they contained.880
Stone circles are to be seen in the northern counties of England, in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Cornwall; and also in Glamorganshire, Orkney, the islands of Arran and Lewis, Argyllshire, Perthshire, Inverness-shire, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire, and Kincardineshire.881 Menhirs, or isolated standing stones, and stone rows are found in this island only on Dartmoor, in Cornwall, Northumberland, Scotland, and Wales.882
In form as well as in size British stone circles present numerous varieties.883 It would, however, be useless, at all events until circles of every kind had been excavated, to attempt to account for their distinctive features; and it is significant that, although various districts have types of their own, there are examples of divers kinds in close proximity.884 Many were simple rings. Some consisted of concentric rings; and here and there small circles, each of which was outside the others, were enclosed within a greater. Sometimes the stones were set up in close proximity; sometimes in open order.885 Among circles of the latter kind Stonehenge, Avebury, and Callernish were approached by stone avenues,886 the existence of which has been tentatively explained by the supposition that originally the spaces