Description

Summary: Cattle skull B1 (and associated remains) from Paul Ashbee's 1964 excavation of the Beckhampton Road Longbarrow

Research results

A cattle bone group (B1) excavated by Ashbee during his 1964 excavation of Beckhampton Road Longbarrow (Bishops Cannings G76). This bone group is one of three apparently deliberately deposited cattle skulls positioned along the length of the longbarrow, on the pre-mound ground surface. The lack of human deposits has led to the suggestion that these remains may have been of considerable importance in the contruction of the barrow. The cranium was found with left and right mandibles, an atlas, axis, and four further cervical vertebrae and was possibly articulated at the time of deposition. The bones show evidence of considerable weathering, and were probably exposed for a number of years prior to being incorperated into the barrow. At the same point, the barrow was awkwardly extended outwards to incorperate a large natural sarsen - Banfield suggests that rather than being a reference for the barrow's construction, this formed part of a display of the cattle remains, paralleling the probable treatment of B5 (now lost) which appears to have been displayed on a stake.

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.