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We're here at the Nympsfield long barrow. It's situated right on the Cotswold escarpment
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with impressive views, but in fact it's one of about a hundred such long barrows scattered
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across this part of the Cotswolds. Now these long barrows were built by early
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farming communities – Neolithic groups as we know them – around about 3,800 BC. They
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were primarily built as burial places and they put in the remains of their community
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to give them a long term future. But they were also monuments that connected those communities
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with their landscape. The capstones I'm afraid are missing. They
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were taken long ago. But we can appreciate the site and we can understand a little bit
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about it worked how it would have looked in Neolithic times. We've got the entranceway
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and that provides if you like a little vestibule inside, then we've got these extraordinary
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stones which constrict the entranceway and by constricting them we create this new space
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beyond which is essentially the passage leading into the main part of the tomb.
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It's in this area that the burials were placed. Now, these monuments lasted for about
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three generations - perhaps 75 or 100 years in total. And over that period they would
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accumulate about 30 or 40 corpses – burials placed in here. Now they didn't keep them
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as corpses, they brought them in and as they decayed bits of bone would be moved further
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and further into the chamber, so that we'd have little piles of skulls, we'd have little
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piles of long bones, we'd have piles of other body parts. Which means that as you
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came in here to visit these people you would have quite literally been walking on the bones
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of the ancestors. We also have to remember that the tomb itself
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may have symbolic meaning. The shape of the mound may well be the shape of an axe for
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example. Or perhaps it was the form of a human torso. Perhaps a female torso such that the
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chamber represented the womb and the dead were being placed back into the womb as if
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they were going back in the earth and back into the mother.