Derbyshire (England) -- Antiquities; Derbyshire (England) -- History
In no case has a bronze or other metallic object been found associated
with these interments. The few stone implements which have been found
are all of flint, and it is significant that these have consisted
mostly of thin and delicately-worked arrow-heads of leaf-shaped form.
The clayey floor of the gallery at Harborough Rocks yielded several of
these, all excessively thin and beautifully wrought, all either broken
or calcined, and associated with fragments of charcoal. Several fine
examples were found in two of the Ringham-low chambers, and the point
of one at Five Wells; and, in addition, a knife of delicate workmanship
was also found with the last, as also fragments of coarse pottery, but
these may have been derived from destroyed later burials at a higher
level.
[Illustration: Fig. 3.
Fig. 4.
Fig. 5.
Figs. 3, 4, and 5.—Plans of “Chambers.” Fig. 3, at Harborough Rocks;
Figs. 4 and 5, at Mininglow, Derbyshire.]
This association of numerous skeletons, dolichocephalic skulls, and
leaf-shaped arrow-heads in Neolithic chambers has been observed
elsewhere in Britain. We need only cross the Derbyshire border a few
miles for an excellent example of this. In 1849 a large and little
disturbed chamber was opened at Wetton, in Staffordshire, which
yielded about thirteen dolichocephalic skeletons and several of these
arrow-heads. Further afield, at Rodmarton, in Gloucestershire, the
arrow-heads were all broken, apparently intentionally, as seems to have
been the case at Harborough Rocks. The placing of things which are
useful in life with the dead is both ancient and widespread, and has
its roots in the belief in man’s continued existence after death, and
that somehow they will still be of use to him. The breaking or burning
of them may have been partly to render them useless to the living, and
partly by thus “killing” them to set their spirits free to join the
departed in the world of spirits. Perhaps, too, there was a sacrificial
intention of propitiating the ancestral spirits. The presence of the
arrow-heads in the gallery at Harborough Rocks is more suggestive of
offerings to the dead than the depositing of objects with them at the
burial. Some prehistoric man would, perhaps, for reasons best known to
himself, crawl into the entrance to the vault of the family or the clan
and there make his offering, and with some appropriate formula dedicate
it to the dead by breaking or burning the objects, the enduring
arrow-heads and charcoal alone remaining to us as witnesses of the act.
The thinness and delicacy of these arrow-heads suggest that they were
made, not for use, but for this special purpose, like the amber and jet
models of implements which have been found in Continental chambers.
A further stage, in which the act has become degraded into a purely
representative one, is seen in the imitation cardboard money which the
Chinaman burns to enrich the soul of his ancestor.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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