caithness-1911/05_023

Transcription

xxii -- HISTORICAL MONUMENTS (SCOTLAND) COMMISSION.

subsequent culture, and they may be regarded as transitional. In
all probability the older culture and sepulchral practices were not
suddenly displaced, but were gradually modified by the presence and
influence of new ideas and new knowledge. As the stone age drew
to a close, and before the use of bronze became general, a change in
the quality and decoration of the pottery found in association with
burials becomes apparent. This new type of pottery differs essentially
from that of the chambered cairns. It is still hand-made, but the
vessels are tall, somewhat cylindrical in shape, flat-bottomed, and
decorated with chevrons, diapers, and encircling lines of impressed
ornament in repeating zones. The vessels belonging to this type or
class are normally associated with a form of sepulture which is
radically different from that of the chambered cairns. The cairn
may still remain, but the chamber within it, as well as the passage
of access, has disappeared, and in place is a stone-built cist or coffin,
formed of slabs and similarly covered. It is often of very small size,
measuring interiorly some 3' in length by 2' in breadth and 14" to
18" in depth. Within the cist is usually a single interment, burnt
or otherwise, and occasionally a vessel of pottery. In addition to
the pottery the graves may still contain objects of flint - arrow-
heads and knives - also beads of jet, and, more rarely, objects of
bronze. Nor is the cairn always present, for such cists are not
infrequently discovered without any superincumbent monument,
and occasionally they are found sunk in the top or somewhere
within the limits of earlier cairns. Such a cist, found on the farm
of Glengolly near Thurso, contained a typical urn of the class
described which is preserved in the Thurso Museum. Another at
Acharole, Watten, yielded besides an urn (now in the National
Museum of Antiquities, Edinburgh) a skeleton with characters quite
distinct from those of the chambered-cairn skeletons. We are here
on the track of a new immigrant race which entered Britain
towards the end of the stone age, and buried their dead in short cists.
They were a people of medium stature, and their distinguishing
physical characteristic was a greater breadth of skull in proportion
to its length than in the case of the chamber-cairn folk, while their
faces were low and broad instead of high and narrow like the faces
of their predecessors. They belonged to a primitive stock which
occupied central Europe towards the end of the stone age, and it is
not certain whether they had a knowledge of bronze when they first
invaded Britain. It is certain, however, that they soon acquired
bronze tools, and their fashion of sepulture prevailed through the
age of bronze, while their culture modified, and ultimately displaced,
that of the chambered cairns.
Another class of monument associated with the sepulchral usages
of the bronze age is the stone circle.
Around certain cairns of the neolithic age have been noted upright
stones set in their outline at irregular intervals. They resemble
buttresses, and probably in the original state of the cairn performed a
somewhat analogous office in preventing the spreading of the structure.
Such stones may be seen in the sides of the cairn at the N. end of
Loch Calder (No. 135). A similar arrangement of boulders in the
outline of a number of round cairns, though not so frequent as in
Sutherland, is still observable in this county (No. 72). A develop-