The Wilson Art Gallery and Museum

Shortly after 4000BC, fundamental changes in lifestyle came about.  People’s dependence on gathering and hunting gave way to the cultivation of arable crops and to the rearing of domestic animals. Settlements became more permanent and the population expanded. Society became more complex with a range of massive stone-built monuments and enclosures providing the focus for ritual and settlement.

Faced with the problem of disposing of the remains of their dead, many Neolithic communities chose to inter the bodies (or sometimes the cremated remains) in chambered tombs constructed inside distinctively shaped stone and soil mounds. These burial chambers and the access passages to them from outside were built of large slabs of stone (orthostats) and dry stone walling.  The covering mound was usually pear-shaped or roughly trapezoidal, often with a shallow ‘horned’ forecourt at one end, the whole surrounded by a low dry stone wall. It has been estimated that each barrow could have taken 10 men some 7 months to build.

Internally there is an 8m. long central passage entered from the forecourt end and leading to four burial chambers set out in a double cruciform, two chambers on each side.

Four of the five burial chambers contained an assortment of human bone amounting altogether to over 600 fragments, representing a minimum of ten adults and an unknown number of adolescents and children. There were also animal bones including those of a young calf seemingly placed in the barrow as a ritual offering.  An unexpected development during the 1930s re-excavation was the discovery of an earlier circular (rotunda) stone mound located centrally inside the barrow and apparently sealed within it when it was built. This circular mound contained a slab-lined cist containing human bones apparently of a single adolescent; scattered over the top of the rotunda were more human bones apparently  deposited around the time the main barrow was constructed. Radiocarbon dating of bone material from the main chambers and the rotunda produce dates around 3600BC.

Other finds included pottery, a bead of Kimmeridge shale  and a quantity of flints including one fine leaf-shaped arrowhead.

 When excavated, the burial chamber contained over 3000 dis-articulated human and animal bones randomly mixed together. At the far end of the chamber however was a largely intact skeleton, probably of a young adolescent, beside which was the skeleton of a small dog (possibly ritually buried with the human). This burial appears to have been treated differently from the other, possibly later, burials in the barrow and ‘respected’ during the rest of the monument’s use. Altogether, up to seven partial skeletons were recovered but modern re-analysis indicates that the barrow probably contained the remains of up to 23 persons. Radiocarbon dating of the intact skeleton (the earliest date of samples from this site)  produced a date of around 3700BC.