Description

Summary: The animal remains assemblage from Paul Ashbee's 1964 excavation of the Beckhampton Road Longbarrow

Research results

Banfield, Stoll and Thomas (2019) publish details of a cattle cranium first described by Banfield (2018), and note the presense of a healed depression fracture on the left frontal. The argue that this is another peice of evidence for the use of a pole-axe in the slaughtering of animals during the Neolithic. They also note that in this case the attempt failed, and may be part of the reason why this individual was eventually buried at the centre of the longbarrow.

In her PhD with the university of Leicester, Banfield (2018) re-examined the osseous assemblages Beckhampton Road, West Kennet and Cold Kitchen Hill long barrows, as well as material held by other institutions from a number of Neolithic long barrows in the Avebury and Salisbury plain areas. She takes a post-humanist approach to these materials, seeking to re-analyse and re-emphasise faunal assemblages which garnered little attention from the original excavators and in initial post-excavation analyses and publication. In doing so, she illustrates both the potential importance of human-animal relations to the communities who contructed these monuments, but also the significant meaning these remains may have conveyed.

The animal remains from Ashbee's 1964 excavation of Beckhampton Road Longbarrow (Bishops Cannings G76). The surviving assemblage comprises of 680 fragments representing 678 specimens (NSP); cattle, pig, sheep/goat, aurochs, Wild boar, red deer, and roe deer are all present, with long bones predominating and cattle being by far the best represented. Animal remains are found in a variety of contexts, but of principal interest are the deposits of three cattle skulls along the length of the long barrow, on the pre-mound surface. These are almost certainly delibaerate and are interpretted by Banfield (2018) as being crucial to the builders of the mound, in the absence of any apparent human deposits. In addition to these remains, an unusually large number of antlers were deposited both within and underneath the barrow mound, including what appear to be two deliberate deposits.