page_title: Bowl barrow
section_title: Description
hierarchical_section_title: Bowl barrow / Description
caption_attribution_description: Bowl barrow plan and section, cropped from a Heywood Sumner illustration in Frank Stevens' "Stonehenge Today and Yesterday"
context_page_description: A bowl barrow is a type of burial mound or tumulus. A barrow is a mound of earth used to cover a tomb. The bowl barrow gets its name from its resemblance to an upturned bowl. Related terms include cairn circle, cairn ring, howe, kerb cairn, tump and rotunda grave.
context_section_description: Bowl barrows were created from the Neolithic through to the Bronze Age in Great Britain. A bowl barrow is an approximately hemispherical mound covering one or more Inhumations or cremations. Where the mound is composed entirely of stone, rather than earth, the term cairn replaces the word barrow. The mound may be simply a mass of earth or stone, or it may be structured by concentric rings of posts, low stone walls, or upright stone slabs. In addition, the mound may have a kerb of stones or wooden posts.
  Barrows were usually built in isolation in various situations on plains, valleys and hill slopes, although the most popular sites were those on hilltops. Bowl barrows were first identified in Great Britain by John Thurnam (1810–73), an English psychiatrist, archaeologist, and ethnologist.
caption: Section and plan of a generic bowl barrow
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