EDO6965 - Launceston Down, Tarrant Launceston; excavation 1938

In 1938 S and C M Piggott investigated some World War 1 training trenches, one of which cut through an area where a group of at least five small barrows had been examined by the Revd J H Austen in 1864. They found the remains of three Deverel-Rimbury vessels exposed in the sides of the trench, each containing cremated bone, one of them also containing a bronze spearhead fragment. A small hole was also found, containing the remains of a further pottery vessel but lacking any associated cremation. The Piggotts felt that these represented an urnfield (a cremation cemetery rather than a further levelled barrow) broadly contemporary with the small barrows, the pottery recovered by Warne being broadly comparable.