A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
The dolmen-builder has persisted in asserting himself. Though cranial
modifications have taken place, the dusky skin, and the dark eyes and
hair and somewhat squat build, have remained in the Western Isles, in
Western Ireland, in Wales, and in Cornwall. It is still represented in
Brittany. It is predominant in South-Western France, and is typical in
Portugal.
After a lapse of time, of what duration we know not, a great wave of
Aryans poured from the mountains of Central Europe, and, traversing
Britain, occupied Ireland. This was the Gael. This people subjugated
the Ivernian inhabitants, and rapidly mixed with them, imposing on
them their tongue, except in South Wales, where the Silurian was found
to have retained his individuality when conquered by Agricola in A.D.
78. But if the Gaelic invaders subjugated the Ivernians, they were in
turn conquered by them, though in a different manner. The strongly
marked religious ideas of the long-headed men, and their deeply rooted
habit of worship of ancestors, impressed and captured the imagination
of their masters, and as the races became fused, the mixed race
continued to build dolmens and erect other megalithic monuments once
characteristic of the long-heads, often on a larger scale than before.
Stonehenge and Avebury were erections of the Bronze Period, and late in
it, and of the composite people.
If we look at the physique of the two races, we find a great difference
between them. The Ivernian was short in stature, with a face mild
in expression, oval, without high cheek-bones, and without strongly
characterised supraciliary ridges. The women were all conspicuously
smaller than the men, and of markedly inferior development. The
conquering race was other. The lower jaw was massive and square at
the chin, the molar bones prominent, and the brows heavy. The head
was remarkably short, and the face expressed vigour, was coarse, and
the aspect threatening. Moreover, the women were as fully developed
as the men, so much so that where all the bones are not present it
is not always easy to distinguish the sex of a skeleton of this
race. What Tacitus says of the German women--that they are almost
equal to the men both in strength and in size--applies also to these
round-headed invaders of Britain; and, indeed, what we are assured of
the Britons in the time of Boadicea, that it was _solitum feminarum
ductu bellare_, shows us that the same masculine character belonged
to the women of British origin. The average difference in civilised
races in the stature of men and women at present is about four inches,
but twice this difference is very usually found to exist between the
male and female skeletons of the Polished Stone Period in the long
barrows. The difference is even more strikingly shown by a comparison
of the male and female collar-bones; and we are able to reproduce from
them in picture the Neolithic woman of the Ivernian race, with narrow
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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