and to have reached the British Isles towards the close of the Stone Age.
Burial by inhumation, i.e. placing the body in a hole in the earth and covering it over with the excavated material, was probably the earliest method of disposing of the dead, after religion became a ruling factor in social life. The next step would be to protect the body from the pressure of the surrounding earth. This was usually done by lining the grave with flagstones set on edge, over which a larger one was placed, as a cover—thus forming the well-known cist of the Bronze Age. Sometimes, instead of flagstones, wooden planks arranged in the shape of a coffin were used, and at other times the body was placed in a tree-trunk coffin. This was made by splitting the trunk of a tree of a suitable length into two portions, one of which was hollowed out as a receptacle for the body, the other being used as a lid. Only two or three of these tree-trunk coffins have been found in Britain, among the best known being that of Gristhorpe barrow, the skeleton from which is preserved in Scarborough Museum; but in Denmark no fewer than forty-three have been recorded up to 1895. But the particular material used for protecting the body depended on what was most readily procurable in the neighbourhood. Canon Greenwell tells us that on the Yorkshire Wolds the stone cist, so common in other parts, was almost entirely wanting, because in chalk districts the requisite slabs were
