# Are all "Burial Chambers" what they seem??



## _harris (Nov 9, 2022)

Seems to me that a lot of "burial sites" (especially NW europe/ UK) are not much more than evidence to a previous natural disaster..

Just a very short post after reading about this:

New secrets from Prittlewell: reconstructing a burial chamber fit for a prince - Current Archaeology

So they found "burial chamber", things hooked onto walls, pots and jars intact but with no body buried within. ...what?

What kind of burial chamber doesn't contain a body?!

I propose a much more logical theory- it was a house... the "coffin" is the bed... floods happened and it got "buried" by centuries of inundation.

It doesn't even necessarily mean there was some sort of mega-tsunami-apocalypse-flood event, but there's the mudflood!!

I think this theory could quite easily transpose onto other sites! (Especially in UK)


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## Quiahuitl (Nov 9, 2022)

I think these so called 'Burial chambers' are ritual sites.  People would go in there to experience sensory deprivation which automatically makes your subconscious more active.  They would use these spaces for communing with the ancestors, seeking guidance etc.

It's like a way of returning to the womb of Mother Earth.  

The island of Sardinia has a unique style of megalithic monuments unlike any I've seen in any other part of Europe.  They have these kind of covered hollow mounds everywhere but the entrance actually looks like a vagina.


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## usselo (Nov 9, 2022)

Prittlewell burial site per wikipedia:


_Prittlewell burial site. __Source_​
Prittlewell burial site: (Google Maps), (Google Streetview), (OpenStreetMap), (NLS), (Flickr images)

It's on a priory site.
A rail runs through one side of it (or nearly - it's not clear).
It contained a folding iron stool.
Folding furniture is generally made to be packed and transported. As a general rule, it concedes comfort, and arguably strength, for portability. This implies the occupant was not permanent in the area but mobile.

Now consider the circumstances of flood. As a human, faced with the prospect of flood, I would tend not to think:


> I fear a flood!
> 
> I know! I will have built for me a sort of static diving bell in which I will wait out the flood at the bottom of the inundation, breathing my own exhalations until the flood passes and it's safe to emerge, check on my surviving family, and command my surviving retainers to rebuild my palace.



Perhaps I would think like this if I knew how deep the flood would be and how long it would last. But even then I would probably just command a place for myself and my royal folding iron stool on one of the royal airships.

Or head for high ground, folding iron stool strapped to a retainer's mule.

On the evidence, Prittlewell seems to have some other explanation.

Apparently in excavations between 1832-1840, a folding iron stool was also found at Bartlow Hills, Cambridgeshire:


_Bartlow Hills, 1777. Source: __Tracery Tales_​
Bartlow Hills: (Google Maps), (Google Streetview), (OpenStreetMap), (NLS), (Flickr images)

Bartlow Hills also has a rail line running through one side of it. (Similarly, at Clare in Suffolk, the castle mound is bounded by a former railway line.) Some time around 1845, Bartlow Hills were relabelled from the original claim that they were Danish to the current claim that they were Roman. And therefore at least 1,400 years old.

Under the mounds were:


> extraordinarily rich burials containing a wonderful collection of artistic objects, the best found in Britain



These artistic objects included a folding iron chair and large wooden chests - presumably treated with long-lasting Roman wood preservative. 1845 excavator Richard Neville also found a small Roman villa 100m east of the hills - a villa whose occupation history is surprisingly well understood given what happened next.

What happened next is that the Bartlow Hills artifacts - stored at high aristocracy-owned Easton Lodge, Dunmow, Essex - were all lost in 1918 when the Lodge burned down.

And, when archaeologists re-excavated Neville's Roman villa in 1950, they found no trace of it. Nor could a later excavation in 2007.

In other words, there is no evidence the Bartlow Hills were Danish or Roman. Nor is there any surviving evidence the Romans - or the Danes - sent off their dead with folding iron chairs and preservative-treated wooden chests.

Prittlewell and Bartlow are the two sites I know of that allegedly contained a folding iron stool or chair. It would be helpful to know of more.

In Bartlow's case, the find and the treatment of the find suggests fraud, perhaps along the lines of Sutton Hoo.

However, the descriptions of the rotting of the wooden artifacts at Prittlewell, Bartlow and Taplow Barrow, Buckinghamshire, (which sadly lacks a folding iron stool) suggests the rotting speeded up after the early 19th century. With Bartlow being excavated with relatively substantial wooden remains in approx the 1830s, Taplow Barrow being excavated in the 1880s with the wood quite rotten and Prittlewell being excavated in the 2000s with wood detectable as soil stains.

Couple that with:

the very new appearance of Bartlow in the late 18th century and:
the very new-sounding profiles of conical mounds described by various writers in the early 19th century
and I suspect you are looking at mounds that were created in the 16th and/or 17th centuries.

Add 1,000 years to the alleged Roman, Danish or Anglo-Saxon build dates for these mounds and the build dates start to suit the described 19th century physical state of these mounds much better.

So we have an alternative explanation for these mounds, which is that they are remnants of the Reformatting Reformation.


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## _harris (Nov 9, 2022)

Quiahuitl said:


> I think these so called 'Burial chambers' are ritual sites.  People would go in there to experience sensory deprivation which automatically makes your subconscious more active.  They would use these spaces for communing with the ancestors, seeking guidance etc.
> 
> It's like a way of returning to the womb of Mother Earth.
> 
> The island of Sardinia has a unique style of megalithic monuments unlike any I've seen in any other part of Europe.  They have these kind of covered hollow mounds everywhere but the entrance actually looks like a vagina.


I totally agree with this, and I don't think they were built for burials.. though some probably were misinterpreted/repurposed (or built, copycat fashion) as tombs later on.

My focus on this thread is to discuss the later so-called Saxon/Anglo-saxon/Viking burials in NW europe here such as the OP example! 


usselo said:


> Folding furniture is generally made to be packed and transported. As a general rule, it concedes comfort, and arguably strength, for portability. This implies the occupant was not permanent in the area but mobile.


Yes, and Prittlewell, being a wooden structure, would surely indicate a temporary residence? And a lack of burial evidence would suggest that the owner of the folding stool was not at home when the inundation happened. Must not have even had time to get home and pack 

The "Mounds" on top of these "burials" seem a lot more like a side-effect of structures being inundated, they would form small islands, or mounds around and on top of structures. I can't think of another way to explain this but you must've seen how relatively large build ups can occer on something much smaller in water?

I'm not trying to claim that every mound ever is a side effect of flooding. I think the burial mound idea from the "iron age" culture has had a significant influence on how any of these later "burial" mounds are seen. Maybe if they looked at them as buried houses, the finds would be less surprising!

On the dating of this, really not certain where to go- there are a few leads pointing to different eras BP, but with the janky chronology and speculative historicity, veiling reality, I can't be sure!

One things almost certain - the post-roman/post-saxon/pre-HighMiddleAges events are the same inundation! And the water must've been quite high for some years..

Here's Richborough castle, doesn't it look like a serious tide mark all the way along the walls?!



Aren't we supposed to see the opposite with ruined structures? Lower levels covered up and the upper levels get damaged from weathering and nature!

Pretty sure there's at least another example in the South-east, too!
(I'm so bad at commiting names to memory.. I'm a concepts-before-words kinda guy, makes posting on here extremely difficult, but fantastic practice to get my brain outputting something coherent for others! haha)


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