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Pit-burial in Grange (navan Lower By.)

Pit-burial

What is recorded here

Yes. Four small burnt pits scatter the southeast edge of the grange, thirty metres apart rather than aligned like a cemetery. They hold charcoal, calcined bone, Bronze Age pottery and a hammer-stone, marking a time when death may have been given up in separate acts across the land. The bones are not clearly human, but the spacing suggests people did not want a shared grave so much as a repeated release.
Four pits (dims 0.33m x 0.26m; D 0.27m to 0.8m x 0.57m; D 0.12m) dispersed about the SE end of the excavated area had fills of charcoal-enriched soils which produced calcined bone that cannot be positively identified as human and in two cases certainly contains some animal bone. One of the pits contained six sherds of mid to late Bronze Age pottery and a hammer-stone. The charcoal was dominated by wild fruitwoods, and samples of bone from two returned C14 dates of 1420-1294 (UBA 12942) and 971-807 cal. BC (UBA 15475), suggesting a Late Bronze Age date for the practice. The pits are more than 30m apart and if they are pit-burials there can have been no intention to create a cemetery. Two other isolated burnt pits that did not have burnt bone could be tentatively added to these. (Kelly 2010, 29-30) See the attached site plan adapted from Kelly (2010, fig. 6) Compiled by: Michael Moore Date of upload: 24 March 2022

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What survives
Recorded monument

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