THE RACES OF EUROPE

by Morant, both males and females belong to the same clearly differen­tiated type, and there is no confusion between them and the Iron Age form. They thus preserved their racial identity at least until the end of the eighth century.

A number of individual cemeteries, which date from the earliest period of Saxon invasion, give us a lively picture of the manner in which the first Saxon raiders and settlers operated. One of these is the graveyard at East Shefford, Berkshire, containing eight male and twelve female adults, as well as eight infantile and juvenile specimens.⁸⁶ All of the adult males thirty years of age or older represent a single type, the classical Saxon, and all are long headed. One of the females belongs to this same type, and she was buried differently from the other women, with horse trappings in her grave. The rest of the women were rounder headed, with cranial % indices going up to 82.4, and some of them were planoccipital. They had wider, shorter noses, some prognathism, and shorter, shallower jaws. The adolescent women seem to be a blend of these two types. Although many of these differences may be due to sex and age, others, such as the funda­mental head form, are clearly racial.

This cemetery presumably represents a raiding party which settled in the upper Thames waters before the onset of the mass invasions. It seems to have included less than twelve men and only one woman who were Saxons. The other women, being Bronze Age descendants, were appar­ently British wives of Saxon invaders, while the children were their off­spring.

The excavation of a round barrow at Dunstable in Bedfordshire throws further light on the survival of the Bronze Age physical type into the Saxon period.⁸⁷ The primary burial of the barrow was a woman of the Early Bronze Age; secondary graves contained cremated bodies of the Middle Bronze Age, while tertiary burials, heaped in a ditch, consisted of one hundred skeletons of persons of the Saxon period who had apparently been executed, or slain in battle. One-tenth of them had their hands tied behind their backs when they died. Owing to the absence of grave goods, for these people were informally slaughtered in a ditch, it is impossible to tell exactly who they were. The view that they were Saxon settlers violently received by the natives is unsubstantiated. Judging by their racial type, they must have been natives slaughtered by the Saxons.

This series contains a hundred skulls, of which those of 52 males are suitable for study. This extensive series resembles the British Bronze Age means in most dimensions, but through the narrowing of the cranial vault, it indicates a certain degree of mixture with the Iron Age Keltic people.

86. Peake, h., and Hooton, e. A., jrai, vol. 45, 1915, pp. 92-130.

^w Dingwall, D., and Young, M., Biometrika, vol. 25, 1933, pp. 147-157.

211

This excellent series, in agreement with that from Berkshire, proves con­clusively that the Bronze Age people did not die out in England but kept on mixing steadily with the Keltic invaders and survived racially into Saxon times.

The Saxon invasions of the British Isles were followed by those of the Danes, who began raiding the British Isles in the eighth century. The Danes, many of whom were actually Norwegians, took the part of England in which the Saxons had become densely settled, but they also raided ex­tensively in the north of Scodand and in Ireland. Very few skulls of these Danes are available for study, but they belong, almost without exception, to the expected northwestern Nordic variety.⁸⁸ Neither a series of six males from the Orkneys, nor of fourteen from various places in Ireland, differs from the type of the Saxons. The further Germanic invasion of the Normans, after their sojourn in France, took place in such late times that the remains of these Normans still repose in Christian cemeteries, and are subjected to the same restrictions which protect the skeletons of the solvent recently deceased from the hands of the anthropologist.

The West Germans who invaded Bavaria, southwestern Germany, northern Switzerland, and Austria, transformed previously Keltic and Illyrian regions into permanent areas of Germanic speech and culture. The tribes most fully responsible for this were the Franks, the Alemanni, the Bajuvars, and the Thuringians. The skeletons contained in the cem­eteries used by these peoples during the first centuries of their settlement have been extensively studied, and it is not difficult to determine to what extent the Germanic type, as exemplified by the Hanoverians, Anglo- Saxons, and Goths was implanted in these regions.

The Bajuvars, the ancestors of the Bavarians, retained the original Germanic head form in their new home, with the cranial index mean of 75 to 76 in various series.⁸⁹ (See Appendix I, col. 44.) Their stature, about 168 cm., was moderately tall, and their cranial type, in most if not all metrical and morphological features, was reminiscent of their northern

88. Bryce, t. H., psas, vol. 61, 1927, pp. 301-317.

Martin, C. P., Prehistoric Man in Ireland, pp. 150-151.

88. Ecker, a., Crania Germanica.

Henckel, K. O., ZFAE, vol. 77, 3/4, 1925.

H6lder, H., AFA, vol. 2, 1867, p. 51.

Hiis and Rutimeyer, Crania Helvetica.

Kollman, J., AFA, vol. 13, 1881, p. 215.

Lehmann-Nitsche, R., BAUB, vol. 11, 1895, pp. 109-296.

Ried, H. A., BAUB, vol. 16-17, 1907, p. 63.

Sailer, K., ZFKL, vol. 18, 1934.

Schicker, J., MAGW, vol. 35, 1905, pp. 54-55.

The most satisfactory group is the unpublished series of Mrs. R. S. Wallis of 62 male and 41 female Bavarian Reihengraber crania measured in the Anthropological Institute at Munich.

THE RACES OF EUROPE

ancestors; but in a few of the smaller groups an approximation to the Keltic form may be suspected. In every local series, however, the head form remains constant, and there are very few brachycephals in any of them. The ancestors of the Hessians, if we may judge by a few examples, were apparently likewise dolichocephals ⁹⁰ of the usual North German form.

The Alemanni may be studied by means of two principal series; a small one of twenty skeletons from Oberrotweil in Baden,⁹¹ and a large one of over two-hundred from Augst,⁹² in the canton of Aargau in Switzerland. The series from Baden, while retaining the usual Germanic cranial index, assumes in other respects the metrical character of the Keltic peoples whom the Alemanni succeeded, and who, as a matter of fact, possessed the same cranial index mean of 75 to 76. One must interpret this evidence from Baden as an indication that these Germanic invaders were to a large extent absorbed by previously settled Kelts, at least in the village which used this cemetery and its immediate neighborhood.

The Alemanni skulls from Switzerland are, as a group, high mesocephals with a mean of 78, and include a considerable number of brachycephalic crania. On the whole, the total series resembles that of the Keltic prede­cessors of the Alemanni, but the stature increased to a mean of 168 cm., and the cranial index of the entire group was gradually lowered. In the fifth century, 50 per cent of the Aargau Alemanni were brachycephalic, in the seventh century, 44 per cent, and in the eighth, 24 per cent. Coinci­dentally, the mean cranial index was reduced over this three hundred year span from 80.2 to 77.5. Thus the Germanic element, or perhaps a Germanic-Keltic blend, increased at the expense of the earlier population, and this increase was, as we shall see later, destined to become, in parts of Switzerland, permanent.

The Thuringians, who are known to us through a series from the Saale Valley in Germany, and through others from several sites in Bohemia,⁹³ practiced the unusual custom, for Germans, of deforming the head by annular constriction. Enough undeformed crania are left, however, for one to determine their racial type. The Thuringians were purely dolicho­cephalic. In none of these groups has a single round-headed skull been found. The skulls are, in fact, longer headed than the normal Anglo- Saxon and Hanoverian basic type and bear certain resemblances to the original Iron Age Danish group, and, at the same time, to the Hallstatt

1. Virchow, R., ZFE, vol. 9, 1877, pp. 495-504.

91. Fleury-Cuello, E., ZFMA, vol. 30, 1930, pp. 406-428.

92. Schwerz, F., AFA, vol. 43, 1917, pp. 270-300.

98. Holter, F., JVST, vol. 12, 1925, pp. 1-114.

Hellich, B., Praehistoricke Lebky v Cechach ze Sbirky Musea Kr&lovstvi Ceskeho.

Maty, J., AnthPr, vol. 13, 1935, pp. 37-53.

Niedcrle, L., MAGW, vol. 22, 1892, pp. 1-18.