A HISTORY OF BERKSHIRE
Taplow, Bucks, and Broomfield, Essex. There were also found a large number of amber beads roughly facetted, a pair of bronze scales such as a goldsmith would use, and a stout iron knife sometimes called a 'scramasax', with angular point and thickened back, along which runs a groove. Some of the glass beads found in this cemetery may well be of Romano-British manufacture. As more characteristic of Kentish or Jutish graves may be mentioned a pair of ear-rings with cubical pendants, and a pair of button-shaped brooches engraved with a human face.
With regard to the physical characteristics of these earliest Teutonic occupants of Berkshire, Mr. Akerman remarked that the skeletons were evidently those of a large and robust race, the thigh bones of the men varying from 20½ to 17½ inches in length, while those of the women varied from 18 to 14 inches. On one occasion he found the skeleton of
CINERARY URNS, LONG WITTENHAM.
(About ½.)
a giantess with a thigh bone over 20 inches in length, but this was clearly exceptional. Several of the skulls were submitted to experts, and the ovoid type, specially characteristic of the Anglo-Saxons, was found to be fully represented.[1]
Exactly one-fifth of the total number of interments found at Long Wittenham were by way of cremation, and though the majority of cinerary urns (see fig.) could not be recovered entire, several specimens have been preserved and illustrated. All had been made by hand, without the wheel, and while some were quite plain, others showed a great variety of ornamentation. As is usually the case, the urns contained very little beyond calcined bones, but, as elsewhere, bronze tweezers and a bone (or ivory) comb were among the fragments, and a small knife
234
- ↑ A female skull is figured and described in Thurnam and Davis' Crania Britannica, pt. ii. pl. 47.
