Pagan Britain
Neolithic Long Barrows and Passage Graves
4000–3000 BC, Neolithic, Britain.
The skulls were sometimes put in one place, the left arm bones in another, almost as if hinting at one composite person lying there in the grave.
In the fourth millennium BC in Britain, nearly six thousand years ago, the dead were exposed to the birds, in the way that the dead in Buddhist Tibet are today. The bodies and their scaffolds were placed inside a circular ditch, perhaps to protect them from any malevolent magic that might be out to harm them. Then, when the bones had been picked clean, they were gathered up and taken to a longhouse of the dead, a long barrow or to a passage grave. Sometimes, as at the West Kennet Long Barrow near Avebury in Wiltshire, shown below, its entrance was a grand affair, huge stones hinting at grand ceremonies that took place there. Or perhaps the interior was grand, like the Le Dehus Passage Grave on the Channel Island of Guernsey, shown in the District Line emblem on the right; or not so grand, like the Creux ét Faies Passage Tomb, l'Eree Bay, Guernsey on the Pagan Underground logo below it.
The bones in these passage graves had not been laid to rest, though. They were movable property. Perhaps boys were compelled to spend a night in the barrow to prove their resistance to fear. Perhaps this is the reason for a carving in the ceiling of Le Dehus Passage Grave, a carving that reveals under natural light seeping in from the entrance an inhabitant that a Neolithic adolescent may have been inclined to give a fearful interpretation to (top right corner of this web page—the carving is on the ceiling of the tomb just to the right foreground of the central pillar in the photograph). Perhaps this ghost emerged as young eyes, accustomed to the gloom, were greeted with the light of dawn. Perhaps communal gatherings took place inside the passage graves; the resonant qualities of many of these chambers have been shown to be conducive to the theatrical amplification of sound. But although bones were not collected together or laid out in respect of any one individual, they seem not to have been randomly thrown together either. In some tombs, where bones were used as relics and were moved about, there is evidence for the bones having been stored in areas containing the same body parts – all the skulls in one place, all the left arm bones in another, almost as if hinting at one composite person lying there in the grave.
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