Oval barrow
The Oval Barrow is a prehistoric burial mound type from the Neolithic and Early Bronze Ages that is found primarily in eastern England . It possibly represents the transition between the older Long Barrows and the younger Round and Disc Barrows . The mound type was built with a wide range (types A – F) over about 800 years.
One of the oldest oval barrows is the "Thickthorn Barrow" in Dorset (3,200 BC), one of the youngest of the "Alfriston Barrow" (2360 BC) in East Sussex . The oval hill under Wayland's Smithy was built over with a long hill. In some places, detached wooden huts appear to have been built in front of the hill. There are four phases in the development of the oval barrow at Barrow Hills, Abingdon in Oxfordshire .
Oval burial mounds are found primarily in Buckinghamshire , Dorset, Kent , Oxfordshire, Sussex, and Yorkshire . They mostly contain a number of pits with cremations and grave goods from the bell-cup culture . Often an older stone mound was simply raised with a pile of earth. The material required was obtained from the oval trench that surrounded the hill. This sometimes asymmetrical trench seems to have emerged gradually. Shafts dug into the mounds are vague signs of the removal of old graves and the introduction of new ones. One of the tumuli shows that the burials took place over a longer period of time, with the pits being offset by 90 degrees to their predecessors.
Whiteleaf Hill
The barrow near the top of Whiteleaf Hill, at Monks Risborough, in Buckinghamshire is indented on one long side and has a kidney-shaped plan. It dates from the Neolithic and was examined by Lindsay Scott in 1934 and 1939 and excavated again between 2002 and 2006. The mound contained a single burial. The C14 dating showed that the complex was at the end of the 4th millennium BC. BC originated or was used. The relics were found between two posts set up 1.2 m apart. Shards of crockery and animal bones were found in the middle of the hill. They suggest that a meal was held on the occasion of the solemn founding ceremony of the hill.
literature
- R. Bradley: The excavation of an oval barrow beside the Abingdon causewayed enclosure. Oxfordshire, Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society vol. 58 (1992),
- Vere Gordon Childe and Isobel Smith: The Excavation of a Neolithic Barrow on Whiteleaf Hill, Bucks. In: Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society for 1954. (New Series, Vol. XX, no.8), pp. 212-30
- G. Hey, C. Dennis and A. Mayes: Archaeological Investigations on Whiteleaf Hill, Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire. 2002-6 in Records of Buckinghamshire, Vol 47 Part 2, pp. 1-80 2007