Page:Prehistoric Britain.djvu/152

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PREHISTORIC BRITAIN

but as it has also been used in all subsequent ages, even up to the present time, it possesses no chronological value. Portions of woollen cloth of four or five different textures are said to have been found in a cist at Greenigoe, parish of Ophir, Orkney, along with two beads, one of amber and the other of an opaque vitreous paste. Also Canon Greenwell has recorded the occasional finding of remains of woollen and leather garments in British barrows, as, for example, in a coffin made out of a hollow oak trunk, found in a barrow at Scale House, Craven. For a notice of this coffin, and similar tree-coffins recorded from England and Denmark, I would refer readers to British Barrows, pp. 375–7.

Of the pottery used for domestic purposes we know very little. According to Canon Greenwell, "the pottery which has been discovered on the site of dwelling-places is a dark-coloured, hard-baked, perfectly plain ware, without ornament of any kind, is, in fact, just what we would expect domestic pottery to be, and has nothing in which it resembles the sepulchral vessels. And more than this, as far as I know of my own experience or can learn from that of others, no whole vessel, or even fragments, of the ordinary sepulchral pottery of the barrows or other places of sepulchre has ever been met with in connection with places of habitation." Sepulchral pottery will be discussed later on in the chapter dealing with memorials of the dead.