Attitudes to Disposal of the Dead - Gazetteer Query Form

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Site name Stanton Harcourt Barrow: Site 4
Site number 1011
Burial codes 4001 4005 4021 4023 4025 4028 4029 4035 4041 4046 4051 4053 4065 4075 4084 4091 4094 4101 4111 4121 4122 4123 4129 4141 4152 4153 4160 4181
2500bc-14/1300bc A bowl barrow and ditch, the mound material of soil mixed with gravel being carried in from elsewhere, and containing a primary cremation burial. The pyre floor covered an oval area at the centre approximately 2.7m x 3.3m and comprised a layer of heavily burnt earth. The central post hole had contained a wooden post standing in and burnt with the pyre, and was filled with charcoal, ash, and some cremated bone and fragments from a bronze dagger including a rivet. On a raised heap on the pyre floor was the cremation deposit, c0.45m x 0.75m, the bones of the complete body of an adult male from which the ashes had been completely sieved and put in the ash pit. It was accompanied by a pygmy cup, a flint fabricator, a shale hone, a bronze dagger and sharpening tool in a sheath of leather and wood (these last above the central post hole), three beads (amber, jet and a fossil sponge), a horn object (possibly part of the sharpening tool), and a bone (?)pin head. The cremation while still hot was then covered by an earth layer.

The ash pit was about 0.8m west of the centre of the central deposit. It had been cut through the pyre floor with a diameter of 0.6m. It was filled with sieved ash and the remnants of cremated bone, and carefully flattened at pyre floor level. Exactly covering it was a clean layer of gravel of convex shape, the excavated material for the ash pit itself. On top of this was a wider spread of earth and charcoal. There were two subsidiary post holes, perhaps pyre supports afterwards burnt.
Remains/Period Y4
County Oxfordshire
Region SE
National grid square SP
X coordinate 409
Y coordinate 46
Bibliographic source Harden and Treweeks 1945


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Last updated: Tues Aug 10 2004