We have already examined the evidence which the articles deposited in graves afford as to the wealth and social condition of the people who were buried there. They also suggest problems connected with their religious faith. The custom of depositing implements, weapons, or ornaments with the dead was the exception rather than the rule. Less than one-fourth of the interments in the Yorkshire Wolds were associated with any article whatever; and even in South Wiltshire barely two-thirds. In Derbyshire and Scotland relics were comparatively frequent, but by no means universal; in Cornwall almost entirely absent.[843] When we find that daggers were often placed in the hands of corpses[844] and that nearly all the flint tools on the Wolds were brand-new,[845] we may be disposed to reject the theory that the motive of those who deposited them was simple affection or superstitious dread of using what had belonged to the living; but when, on the other hand, we remember that so many of the dead were left destitute, we ask ourselves whether the articles that were placed in graves were really intended to be used in a future state.[846] But it is a mistake to expect either uniformity of custom or rigid consistency. Different tribes and different individuals may well have had different beliefs; and it is not likely that belief was always translated into action. Articles that belonged to the living have sometimes been buried from mere motives of affection or from a wish to get rid of that which was associated with the idea of death; sometimes from a vague desire to please or to avoid the displeasure of the dead.[847] Often, however, as we learn not only from historians, such as Caesar[848] and Tacitus,[849] but also from the evidence that has been collected respecting the customs of savage tribes, objects have been deposited with the dead in the full expectation that their souls would be of use to the souls of their owners in another life;[850] and when not inanimate objects only but wives, slaves, and animals have been sacrificed, it may be safely assumed that this was the motive. Nor is the belief absolutely extinct even in civilized lands. Less than half a century ago the widow of an Ulster farmer killed his horse, and, in reply to a remonstrance, asked, ‘Would you have my man go about on foot in the next world?’[851] All these motives may have worked in the Bronze Age. We have seen that offerings of food were placed in food-vessels and drinking-cups; and they may sometimes have been laid beside the dead even when no vessels contained them. The bones of domestic animals, deer, and wild boars which have been found in scores of barrows, and most of which had been pounded for the extraction of the marrow, were doubtless in many cases the remains of the food upon which the survivors had feasted, but perhaps also of food offered to the dead.[852] It is possible too that the burnt bones which are sometimes mixed with cremated human bones may be the remains of animals sacrificed at the funeral, and may represent the custom, described by Homer[853] and Caesar,[854] of slaying animals of which the dead had been fond and burning them on the funeral pile;[855] and when we are told that the skulls of oxen were carefully interred in several barrows and that a horse was buried near the summit of a barrow in Wiltshire above a cremated interment,[856] we are tempted to accept a similar explanation. We can understand why implements and weapons were often placed inside urns along with the burnt bones;[857] but it would be vain to ask why a cow’s tooth was frequently placed in juxtaposition with a corpse;[858] and who would venture to account for the presence of the burnt bones of a fox inside an urn in a barrow on Ridgeway Hill in Dorsetshire, of the skeleton of a mole and the bones of mice in an urn in Glamorganshire, or of the skeleton of a hog in a cist in a Staffordshire barrow?[859] We can only suppose that these mysterious deposits had some religious meaning.
But whether animals were sacrificed or not, there can hardly be a doubt of the prevalence of human sacrifice. It has been pointed out that several bodies were frequently interred in one barrow at the same time; that in some cases a man and a woman were laid in one grave or in adjoining graves of the same date; and that in a barrow overlooking the valley of the Derwent a woman was buried with a man whose head her hands clasped, while his legs were above hers and his right hand upon her hip; and of these facts one finds it difficult to suggest any explanation save that of sacrifice or of suicide.[860] The innumerable potsherds which lay scattered in many barrows when they were first opened, and the minute flint chips with which cinerary urns were sometimes crammed[861] remind one of the words in Hamlet:—
For charitable prayers Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her,
though we should be mistaken if we supposed that in the Bronze Age such offerings were made in the spirit which animated the ‘churlish priest’ who grudged decent burial to Ophelia.[862]
A distinguished archaeologist has argued that not only in Greece and the Eastern Mediterranean but also in Gaul and Britain inhumation and cremation were associated with different conceptions of a future life; the ghost of the body which was interred being regarded as tenanting the grave, whereas, when cremation was practised, the soul was supposed to take flight to Hades or to some far land, though it could not enter the confines until the body which it had quitted was duly burned.[863] But whatever the Mycenaeans and the Greeks may have believed, there is no reason to suppose that in the West cremation was attended with any such doctrinal change. We have seen that both in the Neolithic Age and after, cremation and inhumation were practised contemporaneously and sometimes even in the same grave;[864] and recent excavations have shown that in the caves of Mentone, even in the Old Stone Age, the two modes of sepulture were in use.[865] If the Celts of the Early Iron Age believed that ‘on the burning of the body the soul departed to a distant region’, there is no proof that their belief was different when they laid the body in the grave; and who will maintain that the religious ideas of the Gauls were revolutionized when in the second century before Christ cremation once more became the rule, or that among the Britons of Caesar’s time cremation and inhumation, which had each their votaries, were the outward signs of religious beliefs that were utterly unlike?[866]
Engraved stones.
We may perhaps hope to find other clues to the religious ideas of the Bronze Age in megalithic monuments and in the engraved stones which have been already mentioned.[867] There are certain designs upon the latter of which the meaning is evident. The figure of an axe graven on a cist at Kilmartin in Argyllshire has many analogues on dolmens in the Morbihan and on the walls of artificial sepulchral grottoes in the department of the Marne; and, as the axe in the Mycenaean Age was a symbol of Zeus, we may suppose that such engravings represented a widespread cult of one of the most fruitful of human inventions, which originated in neolithic times, and survived in the manufacture of miniature celts to serve as pendants and, still later, in the use of stone celts as amulets.[868] The most common devices, however, are small circular depressions, called cup-markings, and concentric circles; while occasionally groups of concentric circles are united by grooves. Cup and ring markings are found on the stones of cists, on standing stones, on boulders, and on rocks in most parts of Scotland, in Carnarvonshire and Merionethshire, in Northumberland, Cumberland, Westmorland, Lancashire, Yorkshire, Man, Derbyshire, Staffordshire, Dorsetshire, and Cornwall, and likewise in Ireland, France, Germany, Switzerland, Portugal, Scandinavia, Asia, Africa, and America.[869] Natural cup-markings have been noticed on the covering-stones of certain dolmens;[870] and it may be that such stones were deemed lucky and that, when they could not be obtained, they were imitated; but of those which are artificial the significance remains unknown.[871] The rings may perhaps in some instances be symbolical of sun-worship, for on the cairn of Lough Crew in Ireland and in Scandinavia a few have rays;[872] and since we find them on the covering-stones of cists, while in Australia similar designs, drawn on rocks, are magical or sacred,[873] it would seem probable that they had some religious meaning.[874] Sun-worship undoubtedly prevailed Sun-worship. in certain parts of the British Isles. A few years ago there was found in Zeeland a gold-plated bronze disk, engraved with concentric circles and mounted on a miniature car with the model of a horse attached, which was recognized by all archaeologists as a votive object, connected with the worship of the sun. Similar disks, two of which are ornamented with a cruciform pattern—a well-known solar symbol—have been exhumed in Ireland, and a fragment of one in a barrow near Bath.[875] Besides the spirals which have been already mentioned, the most remarkable of all the rock-carvings is a swastika on a rock near Ilkley, identical with one which has been discovered in Sweden, not far north of Gothenburg: the oldest known examples of this mystical figure come from the second city that was built upon the site of Troy.[876]
Stone circles and other megalithic monuments.
We have seen that many barrows and cairns were immediately surrounded by, or enclosed, rings of standing stones which were part of the sepulchral structure. It is now time to consider the larger stone circles and other megalithic monuments which have occasioned voluminous controversies. They were not invented in the Bronze Age; for, as we have seen,[877] some of the long barrows were surrounded by peristaliths: the famous circle of Callernish in the island of Lewis contains a chambered cairn, from which it is structurally distinct;[878] and some of our circles which are apparently non-sepulchral may have been set up in transitional times. But the development of the circle, which can be traced most clearly in Scotland, was gradual. In the chambered cairns and chambered long barrows the peristalith as a rule was merely an adjunct: in many unchambered cairns and round barrows the stone setting is still a subordinate part of the whole; but, gradually separating itself, it became the leading feature of the monument, while the central cairn or barrow frequently disappeared, and was replaced by a simple cist.[879] By similar stages the encircling trenches and banks in Wiltshire and Oxfordshire became distinct from the small disk barrows which they contained.[880]
Stone circles are to be seen in the northern counties of England, in Derbyshire and Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, Oxfordshire, Gloucestershire, Wiltshire, Dorsetshire, Devonshire, Somersetshire, and Cornwall; and also in Glamorganshire, Orkney, the islands of Arran and Lewis, Argyllshire, Perthshire, Inverness-shire, Banffshire, Aberdeenshire, and Kincardineshire.[881] Menhirs, or isolated standing stones, and stone rows are found in this island only on Dartmoor, in Cornwall, Northumberland, Scotland, and Wales.[882]