224 THE ESSEX NATURALIST.
The Purpose of the Mounds.—In common with other
attempts at exploration of pillow mounds we failed to find any
evidence of interment. Needless to say, we used every care to
identify undisturbed bed-rock below the rabbit tunnels.
To quote again from Mr. Crawford's information. In
excavating a pillow mound on the Malvern Hills, Hilton Price
records finding beneath the mound, at a depth of 3 feet, a quantity
of charcoal and other evidences of fire, together with a thin copper
or bronze ring which is now lost.
This is important as confirming the High Beach evidences
of hot fires having been associated with their foundation.
To my mind, although the mounds are certainly non-military,
the strategic position which they occupy is very suggestive.
They are just on the brow of the hill, with the two important
camps a little further back on the plateau. They are also just
at the Head of a tributary streamlet which forms an inviting
passage up from the important highway of the Lea Valley.
This is very speculative, of course, still the situation is just where
an armed force from the camps might be expected to meet an
enemy coming up from the Lea Valley. Are the pillow mounds
the sites of the funeral pyres of the slain?
However that may be, Mr. Crawford agrees with me that the
pillow mounds may very possibly represent the sites of funeral
pyres. He also makes the further suggestion that the absence
of interment or the remains of bone (so far as we have observed)
might be accounted for by the cremated ashes having been
gathered up and ceremonial interment having taken place
elsewhere.
I do not think that cinerary urns containing the remains of
burnt bones are found on the actual sites of the pyres.
The Pleistocene and Palaeolithic.—Our digging revealed
irregular pockets of gravelly drift in the surface of the Bagshot
Sand.
Quite unexpectedly, one of these patches under Mound E
yielded a Palaeolithic core, which does not look of earlier tech-
nique than the Mousterian, and might well be later. This drift
was extremely hard and compact, almost like concrete, as our
labourer expressed it, and unquestionably undisturbed. This
core was well within the drift, and although not heavily patinated,
was yet very sharply differentiated in this respect from the