Armed with bows and arrows and carefully finished stone axes and spears, clothed in skins and wearing ornaments of curious coloured stones or pieces of bone threaded on thin leathern cords, these Iberians or Neolithic men gradually spread all over the British Islands. They evidently liked the hills overlooking the fresh waters of Lake Pickering for their remains have been found there in considerable quantities.
The hills on all sides of the Vale are studded with barrows from which great quantities of burial urns and skeletons have been exhumed, and wherever the land is under cultivation the plough exposes flint arrow and spear-heads and stone axes.
Many of the numerous finds of this nature have disappeared in small private collections and out of the many barrows that have been explored only in a certain number of instances have any accurate records been taken. It is thus a somewhat difficult task to discover how much or how little of the plunder of the burial mounds belongs to the Neolithic and how much to the Bronze and later ages. The Neolithic people buried in long barrows which are by no means common in Yorkshire, but many of the round ones that have been thoroughly examined reveal no traces of metal, stone implements only being found in them.[1] In Mr. Thomas Bateman's book, entitled "Ten Years' Diggings," there are details of two long barrows, sixty-three circular ones, and many others that had been already disturbed, which were systematically opened by Mr. James Ruddock of Pickering. The fine collection of urns and other relics are, Mr. Bateman states, in his own possession, and are preserved at Lomberdale; but this was in 1861, and I have no knowledge of their subsequent fate.
[1] Greenwell, William. "British Barrows," p. 483.
One of the few long barrows near Pickering, of which Canon Greenwell gives a detailed account, is situated near the Scamridge Dykes--a series of remarkable mounds and ditches running for miles along the hills north of Ebberston. It is highly interesting in connection with the origin of these extensive entrenchments to quote Canon Greenwell's opinion. He describes them as "forming part of a great system of fortification, apparently intended to protect from an invading body advancing from the east, and presenting many features in common with the wold entrenchments on the opposite side of the river Derwent...." "The adjoining moor," he says, "is thickly sprinkled with round barrows, all of which have, at some time or other, been opened, with what results I know not; while cultivation has, within the last few years (1877), destroyed a large number, the very sites of which can now only with great difficulty be distinguished. On the surface of the ground flint implements are most abundant, and there is probably no place in England which has produced more arrow-points, scrapers, rubbers, and other stone articles, than the country in the neighbourhood of the Scamridge Dykes." The doubts as to the antiquity of the Dykes that have been raised need scarcely any stronger refutation, if I may venture an opinion, than that they exist in a piece of country so thickly strewn with implements of the Stone Age. These entrenchments thus seem to point unerringly to the warfare of the early inhabitants of Yorkshire, and there can be little doubt that the Dykes were the scene of great intertribal struggles if the loss of such infinite quantities of weapons is to be adequately accounted for.
The size and construction of the Scamridge Dykes vary from a series of eight or ten parallel ditches and mounds deep enough and high enough to completely hide a man on horseback, to a single ditch and mound barely a foot above and below the ground level. The positions of the Dykes can be seen on the sketch map accompanying this book, but neither an examination of the map nor of the entrenchments themselves gives much clue as to their purpose. They do not keep always to the hill-tops and in places they appear to run into the valleys at right angles to the chief line. Overlooking Troutsdale, to the east of Scamridge farm, where the ground is covered with heather the excavations seem to have retained their original size, for at that point the parallel lines of entrenchments are deepest and most numerous. In various places the farmers have levelled cart tracks across the obstructions and in others they have been almost obliterated by ploughing, but as a rule, where cultivation touches them, the trenches have come to be boundaries for the fields.
The Neolithic people were only beginning to emerge from a state of absolute savagery, and it is possible that even at this time they were still cannibals. The evidence in support of this theory has been obtained from the condition of the bones found in long barrows, for, in many instances, they are discovered in such a dislocated and broken state, that there can be little doubt that the flesh was removed before burial. The long barrow at Scamridge is a good example of this, for the remains of at least fourteen bodies were laid in no order but with the component bones broken, scattered, and lying in the most confused manner. Half a jaw was lying on part of a thigh-bone and a piece of a skull among the bones of a foot, while other parts of what appeared to belong to the same skull were found some distance apart. Canon Greenwell, who describes this barrow with great detail, also mentions that this disarrangement was not due to any disturbance of the barrow after its erection, but, on the contrary, there were most certain indications that the bones had been originally deposited exactly as they were found. He also points out that this condition of things is obviously inconsistent with the idea that the bodies had been buried with the flesh still upon them, and goes on to say that "it appeared to Dr Thurnam that there were in these broken and scattered fragments of skulls and disconnected bones the relics of barbarous feasts, held at the time of the interment, when slaves, captives, or even wives were slain and eaten." But although this argument appeared to Canon Greenwell to have some weight, he is inclined to think that the broken condition of the bones may have been due to the pressure of the mound above them after they had been partially burnt with the fires which were lit at one end of the barrow and so arranged that the heat was drawn through the interior.
As the centuries passed the Neolithic people progressed in many directions. They improved their methods of making their weapons until they were able to produce axe-heads so perfectly ground and polished and with such a keen cutting edge that it would be impossible to make anything better. These celts like the arrow-heads were always fitted into cleft handles or shafts of wood, and it was probably at a later period that the stone hammer, pierced with a hole, made its appearance. Spinning and weaving in some extremely primitive fashion were evolved, so that the people were not entirely clothed in skins. They cultivated wheat to a small extent and kept herds of goats and horned sheep. The pottery they made was crude and almost entirely without ornament. The skeletons of this period show that although they led a life of great activity, probably as hunters, they were rather short in stature, averaging, it is thought by Dr Garson, less than 5 feet 65 inches. Their jaws were not prognathous as in negroes, and their brow ridges were not nearly so prominent as in the men of the Old Stone Age, and thus their facial expression must have been mild.