Beside the urn lay a second specimen of early
pottery, one of those curious perforated jars which antiquaries call by
the very question-begging name of incense-cups; and within it we
discovered the most precious part of all our 'find,' a beautiful
wedge-shaped bronze hatchet, and three thin gold beads. Having no
consideration for the feelings of the ashes, we promptly appropriated
both hatchet and beads, and took the urn and cup as a peace-offering to
the lord of the manor for our desecration of a tomb (with his full
consent) on the land of his fathers.
Why did these bronze-age people burn instead of burying their dead? Why
did they anticipate the latest fashionable mode of disposal of corpses,
and go in for cremation with such thorough conviction? They couldn't
have been influenced by those rather unpleasant sanitary considerations
which so profoundly agitated the mind of 'Graveyard Walker.' Sanitation
was still in a very rudimentary state in the year five thousand B.C.;
and the ingenious Celt, who is still given to 'waking' his neighbours,
when they die of small-pox, with a sublime indifference to the chances
of infection, must have had some other and more powerful reason for
adopting the comparatively unnatural system of cremation in preference
to that of simple burial. The change, I believe, was due to a further
development of religious ideas on the part of the Celtic tribesmen above
that of the primitive stone-age cannibals.
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