Ancient House of the Dead Reveals Glimpse of Neolithic Civilization
By Jim Leary, University of Reading | November 24, 2017 11:14am ET
This summer, the University of Reading Archaeology Field School excavated one of the most extraordinary sites we have ever had the pleasure of investigating. The site is an Early Neolithic long barrow known as "Cat's Brain" and is likely to date to around 3,800 BC. It lies in the heart of the lush Vale of Pewsey in Wiltshire, UK, halfway between the iconic monuments of Stonehenge and Avebury.
It has long been assumed that Neolithic long barrows are funerary monuments; often described as "houses of the dead" due to their similarity in shape to long houses. But the limited evidence for human remains from many of these monuments calls this interpretation into question, and suggests that there is still much to be learnt about them.
In fact, by referring to them as long barrows we may well be missing the main point. To illustrate this, our excavations at Cat's Brain failed to find any human remains, and instead of a tomb they revealed a timber hall, suggesting that it was very much a "house for the living." This provides an interesting opportunity to rethink these famous monuments.
The timber hall at Cat's Brain was surprisingly large, measuring almost 20 metres long and ten metres wide at the front. It was built using posts and beamslots, and some of these timbers were colossal with deep cut foundation trenches, so that it's general appearance is of a robust building with space for considerable numbers of people. The beamslots along the front of the building are substantially deeper than the others, suggesting that its frontage may have been impressively large, monumental in fact, and a break halfway along this line indicates the entrance way.
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https://www.livescience.com/61007-ancient-house-of-dead-monument.html?utm_source=notification
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