page_title: West Kennet Long Barrow
section_title: Human remains
hierarchical_section_title: West Kennet Long Barrow / Human remains
caption_attribution_description: English: The West Kennet Long Barrow is a Neolithic tomb or barrow, situated on a prominent chalk ridge, near Silbury Hill, one-and-a-half miles south of Avebury in Wiltshire, England. - HeritageDaily.com
context_page_description: The West Kennet Long Barrow, also known as South Long Barrow, is a chambered long barrow located near the village of Avebury in the south-western English county of Wiltshire. Probably constructed in the thirty-seventh century BCE, during Britain's Early Neolithic period, today it survives in a partially reconstructed state.
  Archaeologists have established that the monument was built by pastoralist communities shortly after the introduction of agriculture to Britain from continental Europe. Although representing part of an architectural tradition of long barrow building that was widespread across Neolithic Europe, the West Kennet Long Barrow belongs to a localised regional variant of barrows in Western Britain, now known as the Cotswold-Severn Group. Of these, it is part of a cluster of around thirty centring around Avebury in the uplands of northern Wiltshire.
  Built out of earth, local sarsen megaliths, and oolitic limestone imported from the Cotswolds, the long barrow consisted of a sub-rectangular earthen tumulus enclosed by kerb-stones. Its precise date of construction is not known.
context_section_description: Inhumation burials inside the long barrow were discovered by excavation in both 1859 and again in 1955–56. In the early 1980s, four of the bones recovered in the 1950s were subject to radiocarbon dating at the University of Oxford. In the early 2000s the bones were re-examined by osteoarchaeologists, who obtained radiocarbon dates from 25 human skeletons and one goat skeleton from inside the barrow.
  They determined that the 1950s reports made errors in the understandings of these human remains, for instance by failing to always make a distinction between the primary and secondary deposits.
  Piggott argued that a total of 43 individuals were included in these primary deposits. Later reassessment of the evidence suggested that there was more likely 36 individuals interred in the long barrow. However, the osteoarchaeologists Martin Smith and Megan Brickley noted that "demographic divisions" proved "hard to discern" among the skeletal material from West Kennet.
  The skeletal remains were of both sexes, with the ratio of male and female skeletons being roughly balanced. The remains were also of various ages, as four of the five transepts contained both adults and sub-adults.
  The 2000s study found sufficient body parts from at least five individuals that they could state that these were "probably in an articulated or partially articulated state when deposited."
  Radiocarbon dating indicated that all of the individuals interred during the primary phase died comparatively at a time period comparatively closely to one another, and that it is possible that they "could have died at the same time".
  One of the skeletons from inside the long barrow, that of an adult male, contained an arrowhead near the throat. This may have been imbedded in the man's throat at the time of his death. The barrow also included a small cremation deposit.
caption: One of the side chambers inside the central chamber of West Kennet Long Barrow
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