Barrow

Barrow, a burial mound of earth, differing only in the material from a cairn (q.v.), which is composed of stones. Barrows are sometimes called tumuli, a somewhat misleading name, for it does not necessarily imply any connection with burial (q.v.). The custom of heaping earth over the buried dead is probably older than the written history of the human race; at any rate it is mentioned in some of the earliest records (Homer, Il. xxxii. 175; Caesar, De Bello Gal. iv. 19), and barrows are widely scattered all over the world; within a radius of three miles from Stonehenge (q.v.) more than 300 may be counted. The following account of a barrow interment of a Scythian king is abridged from Herodotus (iv. 71). As soon as the king dies a quadrangular trench is sunk, and the embalmed body is placed therein. In some other part of this trench they bury one of the deceased's concubines, whom they previously strangle, together with the baker, the cook, the groom, his most confidential servant, his horses, the choicest of his effects, and finally some golden goblets: to conclude all they fill up the trench with earth, and seem to be emulous in their endeavour to raise as high a mound as possible. Here we have the idea that the individual after death had the same wants as in life, and to provide for these, slaves and animals were slaughtered and food and implements deposited in the grave with the dead.

The barrows of northern Europe range from Neolithic to post-Roman times; indeed, they come down to the days of Charlemagne, for one of his edicts runs thus: "We order that the bodies of Christian Saxons be borne to the burying-places of the church, and not to the barrows of the pagans." None, however, can be referred farther back than the New Stone Age, for they never contain remains of extinct mammals, nor of the reindeer, nor have any Palaeolithic implements been discovered.

Barrows are sometimes divided into chambered and unchambered; but a complete burial-place was a dolmen, covered with a mound and surrounded with a circle of standing stones. A dolmen is a flat stone laid horizontally, or nearly so, on two or more upright stones, and is nothing more than a burial-chamber from which the earth that formerly covered it has been removed by denudation, as is the case with Kit's Coty House, between Rochester and Maidstone. These structures were formerly called cromlechs, a term now disused in England, but still employed in France for what British authors call Stone Circles (q.v.).

According to Bateman (Ten Years' Diggings in the Celtic and Saxon Grave-hills), the fundamental design of British barrows (with the exception of a few chambered or galleried mounds) is that they enclose a rude stone vault or chamber, or a stone chest called a cistvaen, built with more or less care; and in other cases a grave cut out more or less below the natural surface, and lined, if need be, with stone slabs, in which the body was placed in a perfect state, or reduced to ashes by fire. Besides the remains of the buried or cremated corpse, there are found in British barrows: (1) Stone or bronze implements or ornaments; (2) pottery (urns, incense-cups, food vases, and drinking-cups); and (3) bones of quadrupeds, indicating sepulchral feasts, and burnt human bones, proving that slaves were sacrificed at their masters' graves, and probably that widows were burnt with their dead husbands. Of the British ante-Roman barrows, the long ones are supposed to belong exclusively to the Stone, and the round ones to the Bronze, Age. But the determination of the question of age, when not indicated by the presence of implements, is a very difficult one. Sir John Lubbock, after an extended review of the evidence, says that burial in a sitting or contracted posture marks the Neolithic period, cremation the Bronze Age, and the extended position of the corpse the Iron Age. The term barrow is by some writers loosely applied to memorial mounds, as were "the heap of witness" raised by Laban and Jacob (Gen. xxxi. 52), and the mound thrown up by the Ten Thousand in their celebrated retreat when they obtained their first view of the sea (Xenophon Anab. iv. vii. 25).