Note 35 — Chapter VIII · Tombs.

In Scandinavia, during the Bronze age, cremation and burial were practised in about equal proportions. Similar facts are noticed in Germany, but in the North incineration predominates, while in the West it is inhumation. Beneath the cairns of Caithness in Scotland, we find some bodies lying at full length, while others are in a bent position, and large jars of coarse pottery filled with cinders and calcined bones which had belonged to men of medium height. One of the largest of these jars is fifteen or sixteen inches high by forty-nine wide at its largest part.35 In excavating the barrows of the Orkney Islands, Petrie noted the practice of both modes of burial36; but were those buried in manners so different contemporaries? This is what we are not told, and what we have to find out.