Abstract
The Ovingdean Skull. This remarkable trephined skull-a deformation, of which only two other examples of prehistoric date are known from Great Britain-is described by Dr. T. Wilson Parry and Miss M. L. Tildesley in Man of April. The skull was trawled from the sea about three quarters of a mile from the Sussex coast on January 12, 1935. It belonged to a man about sixty years of age, and its surface and texture denote that it had been interred. It is not complete. At the fore-part of both parietals, an inch from the middle line on either side, are two well-defined perforations. That on the right side is almost circular and measures 1.1 in. by 17 in. That on the left is roughly rhomboidal, the long diameter being 17 inches and the antero-posterior Jf in. The method of trephining employed was that of scraping the bone with a flint flake so as to produce a funnel-shaped hole with sides sloping downwards and inwards towards the lumen, a method followed in the third, or Carnac, phase of the neolithic. The operation was performed during life, as the bone shows a slight attempt at reparation. A severe septic periostitis followed, which must have lasted about six weeks. Miss Tildesley's examination indicates that there is nothing in the type of the skull to indicate its date. Similar shapes occur among the Coldrum skulls, but also elsewhere. Maximum breadth alone can be estimated. The fragment is 143 mm. broad and it is unlikely that the original maximum breadth was more than a millimetre or two more. This lie half-way between the greatest average found in the Beaker folk and the lowest found among the neolithic. The bone is hard, suggesting mineralisation, and light grey in colour. The circumstances suggest a cliff burial, which had fallen into the sea; but its colour and consistency are not the same as other bones from the chalk. At the same time, it is not of an appearance which would suggest that it had come from a submerged neolithic forest bed. The only clue to date is the trephining.
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Research Items. Nature 135, 795–797 (1935). https://doi.org/10.1038/135795a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/135795a0