Prehistoric Britain
Round Barrows
2500–1500 BC, Late Neolithic and Bronze Age, Britain.
The people of late Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain liked to invoke the circle when burying their dead.
Alongside stone circles, circles of wooden posts and circular enclosures delineated by a segmented ditch - the so-called 'causewayed enclosures' - the people of late Neolithic and Bronze Age Britain liked to invoke the circle when burying their dead. Their houses, of course, were thatched roundhouses. Just as the longhouses of the early Neolithic in Britain led to long barrows, so, perhaps, the Bronze Age dead needed a suitable house to live in. But perhaps a circle held a deeper significance. The primary burial in these barrows has been known to be placed in a foetal position. The ground was often de-turfed before the building of the mound and sometimes it was freshly ploughed, as though to receive a seed.
