Chambered cairns of a peculiar kind remain in Argyllshire and the islands of Islay and Arran, the like of which have been discovered nowhere else except on the opposite coast of Ireland.[409] Nearly all the pottery that has been found in them closely resembles that of the dolmens of North-Western France and the Pyrenees, while none exactly like it has been exhumed in England; and, combining these facts with the geographical position of the sepulchres themselves, the antiquary who has explored them concludes that their builders came late in the Neolithic Age from Brittany, and, sailing up St. George’s Channel, settled on the opposite shores of Scotland and Ireland.[410] Physically, however, they belonged, as their skeletons show, to the same stock as the great majority of the neolithic people of Britain.[411]
Here, as also in France[412] and Northern Germany,[413] funerals were performed both by inhumation and incineration. In the barrows of South-Western Britain, cremation, although not unknown, was very rare;[414] in Yorkshire[415] and the chambered cairns of Bute,[416] almost universal. Judging from the analogy of other countries and from the fact that inhumation persisted into the Bronze Age, and then for a long period was generally superseded by cremation,[417] it seems probable that the latter was not introduced until a comparatively late epoch.[418] The two modes of burial were, however, contemporaneous not only in different parts of the country but in the same district and in the same grave. Burnt and unburnt bones have been found lying together in such a manner as to prove that they had been interred at the same time.[419] Cremation was generally performed in the chamber or on the floor of the barrow where the body was deposited.[420] When the corpse was buried entire, it was usually laid upon the ground[421] with the knees doubled up towards the chin, or placed sitting in a similar posture by the side of the tomb.[422] This custom, which was almost universal in prehistoric times, and is still practised by many savages, is best explained by the assumption that it was thought seemly to bury the dead in the position in which they had slept, and that, for the sake of warmth, they had commonly lain down to rest in an attitude which most of us have occasionally adopted for the same reason.[423] In some barrows only single skeletons have been found; but generally in unchambered barrows, where more than two persons had been buried in one grave, the bones lay heaped together as though the bodies had been unceremoniously flung down;[424] while in certain cases they were found disjointed in such wise that it was evident that the dead had not been buried entire, or, as is often the case in savage countries and even in Brittany and the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, until long after the flesh had decayed.[425] The Balearic islanders, in the time of Diodorus Siculus,[426] used to sever the bodies of their dead in pieces and inter them in urns; and the same practice prevailed in Spain in the Age of Bronze.[427] British explorers, moreover, have often noticed, in opening barrows, that skeletons were incomplete, many of the bones being absent.[428] Since the piled skeletons belonged to old and young, male and female, it can only be concluded that corpses were often stored, as in a mortuary, until a sufficient number had accumulated, and then buried all together.[429] In a barrow situated at Upper Swell in Gloucestershire, Rolleston found evidence which convinced him that interments were sometimes made successively upon the same spot. An undisturbed skeleton was here surrounded by a great quantity of bones, the arrangement of which was such that he was forced to conclude that they had been displaced in order to make room for it.[430] In chambered barrows successive interments were of course regular, gallery and chamber being designed to admit them.