X1010/6/4

Picture of skeleton of a boy recovered by Worthington George Smith at Dunstable Downs

1887

From: 1887 To: 1887

The following text is taken from Worthington George Smith’s ‘Man, the Primeval Savage – His Haunts and Relics from the Hill-tops of Bedfordshire to Blackwall‘ (1894). In opening the graves found under the round Keltic tumuli on the hills, it does not always follow for certain that the human bones belong to the Kelts of old. I have two skeletons, extracted by myself from round and now ruined tumuli in cultivated fields on Dunstable Downs. Of the age of one of these, a presumed boy, I am uncertain. The boy was dug by me out of the edge of a ruined round tumulus in May 1887, in a cultivated field on the flat downs. The site is a thousand yards south of the five knolls tumuli, but on the east side of the road which passes over the downs. It is tumulus No. 7 on map. The mound was originally 46 feet in diameter. There was originally a central grave and six or seven other graves round the central one. All the graves were small and shallow; none had been excavated into the chalk; the drift only, a foot or 18 inches in depth, had been excavated. After the interments were made, the drift was thrown over the bodies, and a vast quantity of chalk rubble was brought from a distance to make up the tumulus. When the burials in the circumference took place, the drift and chalk rubble were again dug into, but the solid chalk was not touched. All the graves at the time of my examination had been rifled, except one to the north. A few pieces of the leg-bones belonging to one of the rifled graves came to light. The boy found in the undisturbed grave was on his left side, and quite flat. The pieces of bone extracted numbered 443. The skull was in sixty-five pieces. The skeleton, as seen in the grave, is illustrated in this picture. Near the face three flint flakes are shown ; a represents a nodule of iron pyrites with two flakes, one scraper- like, below. All the teeth belonging to both jaws had fallen out; the lower jaw was in five pieces, and the two uncut and imperfectly developed third molar or ‘wisdom’ teeth had fallen from their cavities or alveoli. The teeth, which were all recovered but one, and bones, showed the boy to have been about fourteen years of age; each humerus or upper arm bone was naturally in three pieces, i.e., the head or shoulder end, and lower extremity or elbow end, were both naturally free from the shaft; the head of the bone forms one with the shaft at twenty years, and the lower extremity with the shaft at sixteen years. The head of each femur or thigh-bone was also free ; these become attached at about twenty-five years. The thigh-bone measured 1 ft. 1.5 ins., giving a height of 3 ft. 7.5 ins. for the owner when alive. The cephalic index was 85, showing the boy to have been distinctly brachycephalic; the skull was slightly oblique, caused by the pressure of the tumulus on the head after death, or possibly by one-sided carriage by the mother during infancy. A few flint flakes, a few non-human bones, and a vast number of small pieces of Romano-British pottery were found near the skeleton.

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ARCHAEOLOGY, Dunstable Downs