Monument record MDO1895 - Cremation burial in a barrow, Piddlehinton

Pieces of a Middle Bronze Age bucket urn were brought to the surface by ploughing. A salvage excavation showed them to be from the cremation pit of a barrow. The vessel is of medium size, with a simple flat topped rim, with four simple lugs located below the rim and decorated with finger-tip impressions.

MBA pottery exposed by ploughing. A salvage excavation uncovered a burial cist 0.6 metres in diameter and cut 0.4m into chalk. The urn was broken and mixed with a charcoal layer which lay above a layer of cremated bone mixed with sand but without charcoal. Below the cremation, the walls of the cist were lined with a thin layer of charcoal. Finds in Dorset County Museum. <1> The Bronze Age Urn - Anne Woodward: (1) Large fragments of an urn, which had been broken prior to interment, were found in an apparently primary burial cist, as described above. Much of the rim and body but no fragments of the base were present. The urn is of medium size, with a simple flat topped rim (Fig. 4). It is decorated with four simple oval vertical lugs located 7 cm below the rim and by horizontal rows of finger-tip impressions just below the rim, and between the lugs. The vessel is grey to brown in colour and the fabric is tempered with a medium density of small to large fragments of grog. The urn belongs to a group of medium-sized bucket urns found in the Dorset Downs area (Ellison 1975, Dorset Downs type (d) ). A close parallel is provided by one of the urns from the Deverel Barrow itself (Milborne St Andrew Grinsell No. 14: Grinsell 1968. fig. 12 64e), and other vessels showing similar characteristics are known from the Bagber Barrow, Milborne St Andrew Grinsell No. 2 (Abercromby 1912, No. 445), Milborne St Andrew Grinsell barrow 6h/I (Ellison 1975. PI.93 lower) and the Plush barrow, Piddletrenthide Grinsell No. 10b (ibid PI.98.2 to 4, especially No. 4). The urn was found in a barrow which may have been excavated previously by Cunnington in 1818 (RCHM 1970. 212). His barrow No. 44 may have been RCHM No. (15) Or (16). However the lack of evidence for previous disturbance in the centre of the barrow now investigated suggests that this was not Cunnington's barrow No.44 which had contained a primary cremation (ibid), and that Cunnington 44 was probably RCHM No. (16), equala Grinsell No. 2. Of the three barrows excavated by Cunnington in this vicinity, all contained cremations, and two of them produced sets of urns, five from Cunnington 45 (probably RCHM [18] equals Grinsell No. 4) and a further five from Cunnington 43 (RCHM [16] or [17] equals Grinsell No. 3). There is some confusion as to which of the five urns surviving in Dorset County Museum derived from which barrow, but Acland (1908. 139) states that DCM Nos. 85 (Abercromby 1912 No. 418), 86, 87 (Abercromby 368) and 88 (Abercromby 441) were found in the same barrow. This was probably Cunnington No. 43. DCM No. 91 (Abercromby 404) may therefore have derived from the other barrow which produced urns, Cunnington No. 45, probably equal to RCHM (18). The five surviving urns are all tempered with grog, occasionally with the addition of some fragments of chalk: they include one globular urn, three lugged or cordoned buckets, of different type to that recorded in this note, and one small knobbed cup. On typological grounds it would be expected that the Piddlehinton urn would date from the Middle Bronze Age period and the radiocarbon determination confirms this. The date obtained was as follows: Har-10059 3170 = 80 BP (1200 bc = 80) Calibrated ranges: one sigma: 1540 cal BC to 1360 cal BC two sigma: 1670 cal BC to 1230 cal BC This date correlates well with the dates from the Middle Bronze Age cremation cemetery at Knighton Heath (Grinsell 1982. 15) and with the earlier of the dates in the group of determinations obtained from the Simon's Ground cemetery (ibid) and the Deverel-Rimbury burials from the Barrow Pleck, Handley (Barrett, Bradley et al 1981. 234). Although an earlier origin for the Dorset Downs variant of Deverel-Rimbury ceramics is indicated by the single date for a bucket urn from Arne (1740 bc = 90, Grinsell op cit), the general pattern of dates now suggests that this style of pottery was most commonly produced in the 15th to 12th centuries cal BC (12th to 11th centuries bc).

Record last edited

May 4 2017 3:52PM