[398] W. Greenwell, Brit. Barrows, p. 536; J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times,—the Bronze and Stone Ages, pp. 232, 266-7; Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., xxxvi, 1902, pp. 39-42.
[399] J. Anderson, op. cit., p. 300.
[400] See, however, p. 108, and p. 109, n. 2, infra. According to Dr. R. Munro (Prehist. Scotland, 1899, p. 325), ‘Although many [Scottish] graves have been examined which contained ... stone and nothing of bronze, it does not follow that they were earlier than others in which bronze articles were found. It seems to me’, he continues, ‘that the vast majority of the sepulchral memorials hitherto explored within the Scottish area date from the introduction of bronze’.
The evidence that the Scottish chambered tombs belonged to the Scottish Stone Age is precisely the same as that which is almost unanimously accepted for the English long barrows. Since we find that not a single article of bronze has ever been found with a primary interment in a Scottish chambered cairn, while bronze is abundant in the short cists and unchambered cairns of the same country; that the skeletons in chambered cairns belong to the same stock as the people who built the long barrows (see pp. 393-4, infra); and that the chambered cairns and the chambered long barrows are structurally akin, we may infer that the former, like the latter, belonged to the Stone Age. That, however, some of them may have been built after bronze had been introduced into Southern Britain is not improbable.
[401] J. Anderson, Scotland in Pagan Times,—the Bronze and Stone Ages, pp. 249-50, 258, 264, 272, 274.
[402] Journ. Ethn. Soc., N. S., ii, 1870, pp. 416-9.
[403] Archaeol. Journal, xxviii, 1871, pp. 85-96.
[404] An oval cairn, however, at Pawton in East Cornwall (W. C. Lukis, The Prehist. Stone Monuments of the Brit. Isles,—Cornwall, 1885, p. 11) contains a cist, apparently contemporary with its erection, and is therefore presumably later than the chambered round barrows. It has been suggested (Vict. Hist. of ... Derby, i, 175-6) that the oval form of some barrows may be due to the addition, following secondary interments, of new material.
[405] Ib., pp. 166-9.
[406] T. Bateman, Ten Years’ Diggings, &c., 1861, pp. 253-4. The Derwent Moor barrow was opened in 1780, when the art of excavation was in its infancy; and the urn in question may have belonged to a secondary interment.