EARLY MAN decreases, and of those above increases, the inference being that the ratio of primary to secondary interments decreases. The other test gives a similar preponderance of primary interments to the drinking cup group, for that group had the largest proportion of central to lateral inter- ments. There are yet other features which differentiate the groups. While the flint implements and chippings have a common fades, their distri- bution among these groups presents certain differences. They have occurred with 69 per cent of the drinking cup interments, with 36 per cent of the vased, with 1 1 per cent of the urned. More striking are the average numbers of these objects to the different interments. These numbers work out as follows : About three to each drinking cup inter- ment, one to each inhumated vased, one-third to each cremated vased, and one-fifth to each urned. Nor is this all ; the flint implements found with the first mentioned interments appear to have been more carefully wrought, as a rule, than those associated with the others. Two other peculiarities of these interments may be mentioned. With five of them was an instrument described as a mesh-rule or a modelling tool made from the rib of some animal ; but these instruments have not been associated with other Bronze-age interments in the county. 1 The other is that in these drinking cup interments the skeleton in every case when recorded lay upon its left side, whereas in the rest of the inhumated interments no preference appears to have been given to one side over the other. These different interments afford some interesting particulars of the Bronze-age inhabitants of Derbyshire. Appended to Ten Years' Diggings is a list of skeletons or portions of skeletons then preserved at Lomber- dale, which were obtained by Mr. Bateman and his colleagues from their various diggings. Confining our attention to those Derbyshire examples which may, with more or less certainty, be assigned to the Bronze age, we observe that in seventy entries the skulls were sufficiently perfect to allow of short descriptive notes, and that in thirty-three the lengths of the femora are given. A variety of terms are used in describing the skull- form, as ' boat-shaped,' ' long oval,' ' oval and elevated,' ' medium,' ' short,' ' rather short,' ' brachycephalic,' ' platycephalic,' and ' evenly rounded ' ; while in a few instances they are of a comparative nature, as ' more oval ' and ' shorter form.' In the absence of measurements it is impossible to determine the precise meanings of these terms ; proba- bly Mr. Bateman himself attached no exact value to any of them. Twenty-eight of these skulls appear on the Sheffield catalogue, the rest apparently not having been transferred to that museum. In that list the cephalic index is given in most instances, and the skull-form as based 1 What has been said in the above paragraph of the distribution of flint implements among the different kinds of Bronze-age interments in Derbyshire is substantially true of the Staffordshire series of the same age opened by Messrs. Bateman and Carrington. These yielded one ' mesh-rule,' and it was associated with a drinking-cup interment ; and in the three cases in which the position of the skeleton in these drinking-cup interments is stated, it lay on the left side. 179
