This spring, a small group of artefacts was added to the prehistory gallery at the Corinium Museum in Cirencester. They are all fairly typical of the material culture of the Early Bronze Age – but the 4,000-year-old story that they tell is more unusual. The objects had been discovered some 19km (12 miles) to the east, during archaeological investigations in the Cotswold town of Lechlade, in 2017. Foundations Archaeology had been commissioned to carry out an excavation ahead of the construction of a new community hall and skatepark, and the site was known to be home to a circular cropmark that was suspected to represent the ploughed-out remains of a Bronze Age burial mound. This proved to be correct – but the barrow’s contents were more surprising.
As the project team (led by Andrew Hood) excavated sections through the ring-ditch, they established that it surrounded a space some 19m (62ft) in diameter – and also revealed a more unusual aspect of its design. From the southern portion of this circuit, a second, U-shaped ditch (whose fills suggest it was broadly contemporary with the main ring) extended its arms into the heart of the barrow, and within their embrace was a large central burial.
An enigmatic pair
Considerable effort had gone into the creation of the grave pit, which measured some 2.5m (8.2ft) across and 1.5m (4.9ft) deep. Its base was covered with a 30cm-thick (1ft) bed of gravel, and on this the team found the poorly preserved remains of a middle-aged man who had been laid on his left side in a tightly crouched position (see CA 364). The gravel immediately around his body was noticeably discoloured in a rough rectangle, hinting at the presence of long-decayed organic material: it is possible that the man had been buried in a plank coffin, wrapped in animal skins, or placed on a wooden bier.
