Burial Rites - The Place of the Dead

As usually associated with the construction of round barrows, the predominate burial rite during the Early Bronze Age was inhumation often accompanied by grave goods. However, in the one barrow that has been investigated at Over (as part of a University training excavation) the primary burial was a cremation (the body burnt in situ within a pit). In 1996 a complex mortuary ring-ditch monument was excavated on the slight knoll of Butcher's Rise on the Barleycroft side of the river. Ring-ditches are distinguished from barrows as they tend to be somewhat smaller and seem to only have been slightly mounded, if at all. Whilst some were associated with burial and/or distinct ritual activity (akin to earlier, Late Neolithic henges), in other cases their role seems simply to have been as landscape markers. In this regard they may have been comparable to stone cairns elsewhere and relate to the demarcation of rights to seasonal lands. (In the Needingworth landscape they clearly played a significant role as the pivot points of the Middle/later Bronze fieldsystem tended to focus upon, and 'spin' around, them.)

The Butcher's Rise ring-ditch also attracted non-burial related activity and it went on to become a focus of flintworking - hence why we excavated the buried ground surface across it in alternate metre squares to maximise the recovery of artefacts. The monument was initiated by a single inhumation burial associated with a pair of antennae-like troughs that were subsequently recut as a deep half-circular/ 'C'-shape ditch. Thereafter the inner ring-circle was established - probably with an in situ pit-pyre in its centre.

Finally, the outer ring-ditch was added and 35 human cremations (ten of them deposited in large bucket-like urns) were eventually inset into the southern side of the monument; typically these were not accompanied by grave goods.

Two points warrant notice. Firstly, that the insertion of secondary cremations into its southern side is common to monuments of the period throughout this area and also occurred only on this aspect in the two round barrows investigated during the course of the earlier Haddenham Project. As noted above, that the doorways of all the contemporary buildings also lay in this direction would suggest that southward was the prime orientation during the period (east/southeast being the dominant alignment of subsequent Iron Age buildings). The second point relates to the landscape-situation of this monument: it lay on a rise well away from the contemporary settlements scattered around the fieldsystem. This could suggest that burial was according to larger lineage groups and not the immediate face-to-face settlement community.