Burial Practices around Little Wittenham
Local archaeology has revealed a succession of burial practices in the Wittenham area.
Bronze Age
Bronze Age people buried their dead in crouched position beneath round barrows, or at a later stage cremated them.
In the early Bronze Age, burial mounds appear in the local landscape around Northfield Farm. These were the burials of important individuals, probably the leaders in the tribal community.
Later Bronze Age Cremations with urns are known on the plateau below Round Hill on the south, and the Brightwell Barrow on top of one of the lower chalk hills to the east.
It was between these that the first hilltop enclosure was dug on Castle Hill around 1000 BC, with an adjacent settlement of houses and pits on the plateau below.
Iron Age
Iron Age dead were inhumed in pits or exposed on excarnation platforms, with some body parts buried separately. In the Late Iron Age, cremated remains were buried under small square barrows.
Purpose-dug graves were used for burial in the Early Iron Age, and men, women and children were buried in Middle Iron Age pits in the hillfort interior.
A sequence of man, partial woman and child burials were found in one pit. The burials indicate a variety of rites: complete burial in purpose-dug graves soon after death, sometimes with offerings, burial in former storage pits, sometimes when empty and sometimes half-filled, excarnation (exposing the body to be defleshed and disarticulated by the elements and scavengers), separation of particular bones (skulls and long bones in particular) and their careful burial in pits and other features elsewhere, and from the cut marks either assisted disarticulation or deliberate sacrifice.
This was the burial ground of the local community that lived on the plateau south of Castle and Round Hills from the Late Bronze Age to the end of the Roman period, and given the effort put into constructing the hillfort and its pre-eminence in the landscape, may have served the surrounding communities as well.
The hilltop enclosure and succeeding hillfort presumably indicate some belief in the importance of high places, possibly proximity to the sky, the sun and moon or other gods of the heavens. Not everyone would have been buried at the hillfort, however; burials have been found in a pit within the settlement, and such burials are common in Iron Age settlements across the Upper Thames valley.
Two small square enclosures just outside the SW entrance to the hillfort may plausibly be interpreted as Late Iron Age square barrows, and would therefore suggest a continuing focus of burial at Castle Hill, and of important people at that. Such barrows are very rare in the Upper Thames Valley, though they can be Early Roman rather than Iron Age in this area.
Romans
The Romans introduced cemeteries and buried their dead in coffins.
Burial in the Roman period in the local area presents some interesting contrasts. On the one hand, cremations, inhumations and finds such as bronze bracelets found at the hillfort show that Castle Hill retained as a local burial place throughout the Roman period. At least one Roman inhumation burial has also been found in the adjacent settlement.
A small roadside cemetery within a rectangular enclosure probably existed outside the large settlement astride the Roman trackway south of Northfield Farm, and around Dorchester-on-Thames there were several large cemeteries alongside the roads. This shows the juxtaposition of traditional locations for burials and new practices (roadside large cemeteries outside towns) adopted from the Continent.
Saxon
We do not know the nature of early Saxon activity either within the hillfort or in the settlement outside, but the presence of pottery in both suggests some continuity of use. It is likely that the eventual break with this traditional burial site was brought about by the advent of Christianity in the 7th Century, which in this case established a new focus of worship, and of burial, on a new site by the Thames, within sight of the abbey and bishopric of Dorchester-on-Thames.
The burial ground by the church was the focus for a parish, almost certainly a smaller community than that using the hillfort. During the medieval period the manor was owned by Abingdon Abbey, so had absentee landlords, and few people of significance will have been buried at Little Wittenham. After the Dissolution, however, the new manorial owners, the Dunches, lived and were mostly buried at Little Wittenham. The significance of the church and burial ground has declined again since. The burial ground now has had at least 1000 years of use, possibly 1300.
Modern burials
In a more secular age, there may be evidence of Castle Hill again becoming a last resting place for some. In recent years people are known to have scattered the cremated ashes of loved relatives at the site.
