The White Horse Hill Burial, Dartmoor

It was more than a year ago that I first mentioned the ongoing analysis of finds from a cist burial on Whitehorse Hill in the midst of Dartmoor, the boggy, misty hills of southwestern England. But the work continues, and there has been a recent spate of publications about the site.The burial has been radiocarbon dated to between 1900 and 1500 BC, which in Britain is the Early Bronze Age. A "cist" is a sort of stone box within which the cremated remains and the grave goods were placed. The bones are from a young adult. They are not identifiable as to sex, but based on the artifacts the betting is on a woman. The grave was placed on top of a remote, uninhabited hill, and a mound was raised over it, surely a significant act for an important person.

The basket, which was a black mass of good last time I saw it, has been cleaned and studied. It is made of the inner bark of lime (linden) trees, soaked in water to soften them. It was made in three sections: flat disks for the top and bottom, connected by a cylinder. The three pieces were only roughly stitched together.

Among the objects in the basket were these wooden ear spools and most of the 200 beads found in the burial.

The tin beads on this arm band are especially interesting because while everyone has long assumed that the rich tin deposits of Cornwall were exploited during the Bronze Age there is precious little evidence of that, especially for the early period.

The 200 beads seem to have been loose within the basket when they went into the tomb, not strung. Seven are amber, which had to be imported from Denmark. There are 92 perforated discs or spheres made of stone, and 110 chunky clay beads of varying sizes; the clay is not local to Dartmoor. This arrangement was made by the archaeologists, of course; they chose to put the single tin bead in the center.