For those interested in the chronology of burial practice in relation to barrow cemeteries a recent paper in Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society “Dating the Dead: a High-Resolution Radiocarbon
Chronology of Burial Within an Early Bronze Age Barrow Cemetery at Over, Cambridgeshire “ opens new ground (cough) and insights at a generational level , in a similar fashion to the Whittle ,Bayliss et al. work on Long Barrows 7-8 years ago . The results show that there was a great variability , of individuals buried , (half were children ) Variabilty of burial practice ;inhumations in flat graves were followed by cremations in turf mounds followed by later inhumations (once the barrow cemetery began the barrows were built and used chronologically in a period between 110 -260 years , one being built after the previous had been “used up” ) .Variability in the type of cremation i.e. 1. Urned cremation burials on pyres. 2. Urned cremation burials within pits. 3. Un-urned cremation burials within pits. 4. In situ ‘pit pyres’ (with and without urns). There has been a great shift in our understanding of EBA/beaker burials in the past decade , often due to Paul Garwood but this is something new .