Page 127 - Four Thousand Years Ago by Geoffrey Bibby

They are not disturbed by the ritual cannibalism of the farmers
on the Downs, for it is confined for the most part to the eating of

dead relatives. But they do, as far as possible, arrange to be else­
where when the rumor reaches them that a new encampment or
village or temple of this people is to be erected, or when they see

the long mound going up above a place of burial and know that
a new burial enclosure is soon to be consecrated. For on such
occasions it is the custom of the farmer folk to erect a stout post,

or an upright stone, on the sunrise side of the area to be conse­
crated, and this upright pillar—everyone knows that it is a sym­
bol of man’s fertility—will be immensely more potent if the body

of a freshly slaughtered boy or youth is buried in the hole in
which it is to be raised.
But to everyone his own beliefs. The religion of the people

of the upper Thames is no less strange and complicated, and is
but imperfectly understood by the visiting traders and their
apprentices. (We, nearly four thousand years later, are quite un­

able to reconstruct the ritual or the thought behind the ritual
from the archaeological evidence, and even the deliberately

vague picture given here is wild guesswork, much more likely to
be wrong than right.) They have frequently seen the holy places
of this widespread people, and have noticed their resemblance
to the burial places of the farmers of the Downs, a fact which

is enough to make them chary about inquiring more closely into
the details of ritual. They know that the hill farmers lay out their

dead in small turf or wooden chambers set within an oblong or
oval ring-mound, often with the grim stone or wooden pillars
standing to the east and casting their sunrise shadows across

the houses of the dead. And when the death chambers are full,
a high barrow is cast up above the bodies and a new enclosure is
laid out. Though the temples of the valley folk are not primarily

places of burial, they, too, are ring-mounds, round or oval or even
laid out as a ring within a square. And here, too, standing
stones or posts can be seen on the eastern side of the enclosure,
while within the enclosure can be seen rings of holes, dug down

through the turf and filled in again with white stamped chalk.
They are all too suggestive of graves, and there is talk of bodies

eing burnt on the nights when the holes are dug. That is all