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being disturbed, so that no scrap of knowledge might be lost. General Pitt-Rivers is so well aware how much knowledge has been lost through explorers not observing the right facts, that he has sought to guard against this in his work by tabulating all his finds so minutely as to anticipate future questions by an exact record of their position and character. Moreover, every fragment of the slightest importance has been carefully drawn to illustrate these volumes; the drawings of the skulls alone being a valuable contribution to craniology.

The first two volumes are chiefly occupied with an account of the excavation of two Romano-British villages on the Rushmore estate. This excavating has been no nibbling; every foot of ground has been dug over, so that nothing has been left unexplored. Hence a fairly complete picture has been obtained of the civilization of the inhabitants of these villages. It is as follows.

The villages appear to have had no defences, but had quite an elaborate system of drains to carry off the surface water. The houses were built of daub and wattle, and were probably round, but some had flat sides, and were plastered and painted. Timber was used in house-building, with iron nails and clamps. Rude imitations of Roman hypocausts were found under a few of the houses. From the general absence of weapons (only two spear-points having been found), a peaceful and settled state of society may be deduced. The inhabitants fed chiefly on domesticated animals, eating even the horse, and very seldom the deer. Their tools were of iron. They grew wheat in small enclosures round their villages, and ground it upon stone querns. They spun thread, wove it on the spot, and sewed it with iron needles. There were indications of comfort and even of refinement; in each village one quarter appeared to have been inhabited by persons of a higher class. Fragments of red Samian ware of the finest quality, which would be equal to our china, were found; also bronze handles and bosses which must have belonged to chests; glass vessels, and games of draughts. One brooch which was found was of the very finest mosaic. Oysters were eaten, which at such a distance from the coast, implies a certain degree of luxury. A number of iron styli showed that some inhabitants at least were able to read and write.

No traces of Christianity were found. Two skeletons, found in a ditch, had so many large stones about them as to suggest the idea that their owners had been stoned to death. Nearly one-eighth of the inhabitants had died violent deaths. The number of skeletons of new-born children suggests that infanticide was not uncommon, and reminds us of the boxes of dead babies which Mr. Petrie found so frequently in excavating the Egyptian city of Kahun. The coins which were unearthed show that the villages were occupied up to the time of Constantine, and one of them up to the year

350.

The dead were buried in pits, which appear to have been originally dug for refuse-pits, and used as graves when they had become filled up. Some were buried in the crouched position so common in prehistoric burials, others were extended, and some appear to have been tossed in without any ceremony at all. No orientation was observable. But it is the character of these skeletons which forms the most important discovery and the greatest puzzle in the excavation of these villages. Their small stature, averaging about 5 feet 2 inches for men, and very much less for women, their slender bones, the form and above all the length of their skulls, lead irresistibly to the conclusion (though General Pitt-Rivers is cautious about drawing it) that they belonged to the same race as the mysterious dolico-cephalous people whose bones we find in the long barrows which abound in Dorset and Wilts. Dr. Garson, who has examined the skulls, pronounces them to be of a mixed type, but inclines to the belief that "we have here to deal with a crossing between the Roman and the early dolico-cephalic British race," and not with any crossing with Celtic tribes. Many observers had already declared that there was a survival of this long-headed, small-featured, short-statured type in Dorset at the present day, and General Pitt-Rivers says that his personal observations confirm this. A few brachycephalic skulls were found in the villages, pronounced to be rather of Roman than Celtic type. This suggests at once the idea that we have in these villages the Roman colonist or steward, working the estate with a troop of slaves who belonged to the ancient neolithic race, the people of the long barrows, whose blood had become a little mixed with that of their Roman masters. The discovery is one of

intense interest, especially in its bearing on the question so much discussed at the present day, of the amount of mixture which the Anglo-Saxon race has undergone with the indigenous races of this island.

Now

But I have said that the discovery is also a puzzle, and the puzzle is this. Near one of these villages lie a number of round barrows, and the excavation of these barrows is related in General Pitt-Rivers' second volume. These barrows were found to belong to the bronze-using, brachycephalic people who by some ethnologists are supposed to be the Kelts, and by others to be of Finnish origin. Whoever they were, it is generally believed that they came later into Britain than the long-headed, stone-using race, overcame them by their superior weapons, and afterwards intermarried with them, thus producing the medium type of skull which is so often found in the round barrows. underneath the site of a house in the Romano-British village which lay near the barrows, was found a grave containing a skeleton of the usual large stature and round skull of the Bronze race, with an unmistakeable Bronze Age food-vessel by his side. It looks as though the people of the village had cleared away his barrow to make a site for their huts, without finding the interment below. This cool indifference to the graves of their supposed conquerors is surprising in itself; but still more puzzling is the question, Where are the conquerors? What has become of them? Has their type become lost in that of these dwindled neoliths, or did they retreat to other parts of Britain before the Roman sword? If ever excavations as careful as those of General Pitt-Rivers are accomplished on as large a scale in other parts of Britain, we shall perhaps get answers to these questions. In the meantime, we shall do well to suspend our desire for the solution of problems until we have a wider range of facts to deal with.

The third volume of General Pitt-Rivers' work contains an account of his excavations in Bokerly Dyke and the Wansdyke, the latter a famous earthwork, as long as the Roman Wall, stretching from Portishead on the Severn to Chisbury Camp in Wiltshire, the latter a shorter length of earthwork, in the main parallel with the Wansdyke, but further to the south. The late Dr. Guest, of whose great learning such scholars as Dr. Freeman and Mr. J. R. Green

always spoke with bated breath, thought he had determined the origin of these earthworks, which he called the "Belgic ditches." But the spade has little respect for great reputations. It has tossed Dr. Guest's theories into the air, for in the hands of General Pitt-Rivers it has conclusively proved that Bokerly Dyke was not earlier than the reign of Honorius, and Wansdyke, though the terminus a quo of its possible date is not so decisively fixed, is certainly Roman or postRoman. These facts were placed beyond the possibility of a doubt by coins of Honorius, which were found in the rampart of Bokerly Dyke at a depth to which they could. not possibly have been carried by drainage from the surface, and by pieces of red Samian pottery which were found on the original surface of the ground underneath the Wansdyke. It will be seen at once that these discoveries are of great importance to early English history. Both the Wansdyke and Bokerly Dyke have their ditches to the north, showing that it was from the north that the enemy was expected. Within the protection of these dykes a large population appears to have been crowded at the period represented by the Romano-British villages already excavated by General Pitt-Rivers. Within a radius of six or seven miles from Rushmore," he says, "I have counted twelve or thirteen places in which Roman remains have been found, some of them apparently villages of equal size to those which I have excavated." Calling to mind the brief facts recorded by the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle concerning the West-Saxon conquest, which have been elaborated by Mr. Green into a complete history of that conquest, it is plain without laying down all the details as clearly as Mr. Green has related them, that the West-Saxons did not make any advance over the frontiers of what is now Dorsetshire for more than a hundred years after the time of Cerdic, while Gildas relates that they received a severe check at Mons Badonicus, a place which has never been identified, but which Dr. Guest supposed to be Badbury in Dorsetshire. Comparing these statements with the evidence of archæology, and also with some significant names of places to be found in that neighbourhood, General Pitt-Rivers is disposed to believe that the Wansdyke and Bokerly Dyke represent two different lines of boundary raised at different periods by the Romano-Britons of the sixth century against the encroach

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ments of the West-Saxons, and behind which they maintained a precarious independence until the conquests of Cenwealh in 658.

"I

General Pitt-Rivers has had a unique experience in the exploration of earthworks, whether boundary lines or forts, and the record of his discoveries is encouraging, for it teaches us that it need no longer be considered hopeless to find any clue to these mysterious traces of human activity. "I have seldom or never failed," he says, "to find something in a rampart capable of throwing light on its construction.' believe there is not one of the enormous number of camps scattered over the country, the date of which might not be fixed by sections cut through the rampart." Yorkshire abounds so much in earthworks of every kind, that these words have a peculiar interest for Yorkshire readers. Some of these earthworks have already been subjected to scientific exploration, as, for example, the so-called Danes' Dyke, near Flamborough Head, which General Pitt-Rivers has excavated himself, and which he has proved to belong to the early Bronze Age: the same age as the barrows on the York Wolds, explored by Canon Greenwell. I am not aware that the so-called Roman Rig, the dyke which runs along the hills from Sheffield to Mexborough, has ever been made the subject of a scientific excavation. Another type of earthwork is very abundant in Yorkshire: the moated mound with the moated and ramparted platform attached. This form of fortification is supposed by Mr. G. T. Clark to be AngloSaxon, but the evidence is not conclusive; and in the only case I know of where such a camp has been cut into--Cæsar's Camp, near Folkestone, excavated by General Pitt-Rivers some years ago-it proved to be Norman.

In fact, one of the great lessons of General Pitt-Rivers' work is that the spade, and the spade only, can decide the date of an earthwork or a barrow. The spade, moreover, must be an intelligent and instructed spade, or it will only destroy the evidence it is seeking to reveal. An amateur, cutting into a barrow or an earthwork, does not know what the questions are which have to be answered, and so he obliterates the answers to them. Minute observation is one. of the most essential conditions of successful exploration.

The spade, unfortunately, is an expensive instrument, and for this reason we may have to wait long for the data on

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