Whimster Rowan. Burial Practices in Iron Age Britain: Parts I and II: A Discussion and Gazetteer of the Evidence c. 700 B.C.-A.D. 43

BAR Publishing, 1981. — 470 p. — (BAR British Series 90).Although two previous studies have sought to define the character of better known Middle and Late La Ilene inhumation and cremation rites in restricted areas of eastern Yorkshire (Stead, 1965) and south-eastern England (Birchall, 1965), few attempts have been made to isolate and compare the methods of burial employed in other areas of Iron Age Britain between the closing of the insular Bronze Age and the Claudian conquest of these islands in A.D. 43. Bearing in mind that funerary customs might be expected to provide so me of the most valuable and reliable indices of cultural continuity or change, this lack of attention is re markable in a half century in which prehistorians have sought energetically to explain the development of British Iron Age society in terms of opposed theories of continentally-derived migration and self-contained insular evolution (Hawkes, 1931, 1958; Hodson, 1964; Clark, 1966). Indeed, it would only see m possible to assume that the wealth of infor mation provided by a profusion of hillfort, settle ment, ceramic and metalwork forms had consistently distracted the majority of scholars from the sobering realisation that the greater part of the country was quite unable to provide funerary evidence to match that of the long-recognised, and see mingly intrusive, Arras and Aylesford Cultures, and that its co mmunities could thus be neither co mpared nor contrasted with their conte mporary continental counterparts in terms of burial practices. Although this striking paucity of insular evidence was already beco ming apparent when C. F. C. Hawkes and G. C. Dunning drew attention to the novel, and archaeologically visible, cre mation practices of their Belgic colonists, its significance was not aforded proper recognition until F. R. Hodson defined an absence of burial sites as a specific feature of an insular 'Woodbury Culture' (Hawkes and Dunning, 1930; Cunnington, 1932, 31; Hodson, 1964, 205).
Because no subsequent attempts had been made to test the validity of Hodson's assumption, or to explore its broader cultural implications, this present study was initiated with the purpose of providing a thorough re-appraisal of all the documented insular funerary evidence. As a preliminary to any analytical discussion, however, it was essential that eforts should first be directed towards the provision of an exhaustive, or near-exhaustive, catalogue of all formal deposits of human re mains recovered from confir med or probable Iron Age contexts in mainland Britain.