[741] Excavations in Cranborne Chase, iv, 22-3 (preface). ‘There is no knowing,’ says Pitt-Rivers, ‘how many of these graves without mounds or ditches may exist in the soil; as they show no mark on the surface, they can only be found accidentally’.
[742] W. Greenwell, Brit. Barrows, p. 113.
[743] Trans. Devon. Association, xxxiv, 1902, p. 111.
[744] Brit. Barrows, p. 402. For other instances of moundless graves see Anthr. Rev., iii, 1865 (Journ. Anthr. Soc., p. lxvii); Journ. Brit. Archaeol. Association, xlv, 1889, pp. 112-22; Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd ser., xvi, 1895-7, p. 335; W. C. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, iii, 1013; Archaeol. Cambr., 6th ser., ii, 1902, p. 28; Wilts Archaeol. and Nat. Hist. Mag., xxxiii, 1904, pp. 410-1; Archeol. Aeliana, 3rd ser., ii, 1906, p. 132; and Vict. Hist. of ... Lancs, i, 245. Mr. J. R. Mortimer, Forty Years’ Researches, p. lxxii, suggests that ‘the great number of small cairns which even yet exist on the uncultivated moors of Yorkshire’ may have ‘belonged to the masses’.
[745] See pp. 105-6, supra.
[746] Trans. Lancs. and Cheshire Ant. Soc., xviii, 1900 (1901), pp. 114-24.
[747] These cists are assigned by the excavators, Dr. W. A. Herdman and Mr. P. M. C. Kermode (Proc. Liverpool Biol. Soc., viii, 1894, pp. 159-72), to the Neolithic Age; but the evidence which they adduce is purely negative. Perhaps the people who built them only had stone tools; but the fact that the interments were in cists and accompanied by cinerary urns proves that they were made after bronze had come into use.
[748] A. Pitt-Rivers, Excavations in Cranborne Chase, ii, 4; Archaeologia, lii, 1890, pp. 24-7, 41, 60; W. C. Borlase, Dolmens of Ireland, ii, 634; Général Pothier, Les tumulus du plateau de Ger, 1900, pp. 28-9. See also Journ. Anthr. Inst., xv, 1886, pp. 95-7.
[749] J. H. F. Brabner, Gazetteer of England and Wales, vi, 31.
[750] W. Greenwell, Brit. Barrows, p. 2, n. 2. Mr. J. R. Mortimer (Forty Years’ Researches, p. xviii, n. ||) remarks that ‘it could hardly be expected that these two small openings would be more likely to find the primary grave ... than two rat holes would be likely to come upon the ashes of a mouse placed under a mound ten feet in diameter’.