On the various forms of the so-called 'Celtic' cranium / by Professor Rolleston.

  • Rolleston, George, 1829-1881.
Date:
[1868]
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Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the various forms of the so-called 'Celtic' cranium / by Professor Rolleston. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    From the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology, \ ol. III. ’ hnP. i Sift (?c*j? - /y 6<a t- /u ^ &+ DN THE VARIOUS FORMS OF THE SO-CALLED “ CELTIC ” % CRANIUM. By Peofessor Rolleston, M.D. F.R.S. Oxford. Professor Nilsson, 18 years ago, declared that he considered nothing more vague and uncertain than the form of the Celtic cranium1; and Professor Ecker2 has expressed himself in much the same language as to the Roman cranium: the latter of these two authors, however, has done much towards removing some of the uncertainty of which he complains. Upon these two points I should wish here to make a few remarks. Under the head of pre-Roman skulls, found in Britain, most writers would be agreed that three distinct types may be classed under the three distinct types of the “ River-bed” type of Professor Huxley, of the braehyc^fffhlic type of Dr Thurnam, and the dolicho-cephalic “pre-Celtic’- type of the same author. I have to say that a dolicho-cephalic cranium, distinct from the dolicho-cephalic Celtic cranium found in the long barrows, exists in addition to these three types, with the latter of which, I believe, it is some- times confounded. Representatives of this type of crania may be found in a cast in the easily accessible Museum of the London College of Surgeons, and in another cast, made by Dr Thurnam, and now widely circulated, of a cranium procured by me, through the kindness of J. C. Athorpe, Esq., from a barrow near Dinnington, in South Yorkshire; and, finally, in no less than thirty-two crania or calvaria, which the inexhaustible civility of William Aid worth, Esq. has enabled me to procure from an all but equally inexhausti- ble cemetery on his estate at Frilford. First, of the cast in the College of Surgeons; in the Catalogue of the Osteol gical Series it may be found de- scribed thus at No. 5709: “A plaster cast of the cranium of an ancient aboriginal of Scandinavia regarded as the Celt. The cranium is long in proportion to its breadth, and resembles in size and shape the Gentoo skull, No. 5553. This is the type of a-class of skulls, called dolicho-cephalic by the donor, Professor Retzius.” Secondly, of the Dinnington cranium, I would •yctjcffus remark that Professor Ecker, in Archiv fur Anthropologie, Bd. i. Hft. 2, p. 2S3, has remarked of it, that it is exceedingly like the Frankish skulls obtained by him from his grave-row cemeteries. And Dr Barnard Davis, in his Thesaurus Graniorum, p. 10, speaks of it as “a very large, even enormous, subscapho-cephalic skull.” Of the thirty-two crania obtained by mo from Frilford, which from archaeological evidence detailed by me in a paper to be published by the Society of Antiquarians have been shown to belong to pre-Saxon times, I may say, firstly, that they resemble very closely the two casts already mentioned; and secondly, that they differ from the dolicho-cephalic crania ordinarily obtained from long barrows, and notably from such crania obtained for me, by the agency of the Rev. David Royce, from a long barrow at Netherswell, near Stow-on-the-Wold, as much as any two sets ot dolicho-cephalic crania can differ. Their frontal region though not loftier is yet fuller and wider; and much the same description may apply to every other part of the calvarium, which in no point corre- sponds to the description given by His and Rutimeycr to their Hohberg type ol skull, except that occasionally in male skulls, though by no means always, it has the mesial vertical carina, developed in male specimens (cf. Professor Ecker, Archiv fur A nlhropologie, Bd. i. Hft. 1, p. 84). The skulls 1 Crania Britannica, Letter to Dr Thurnam, p. 17. 2 Archiv fur Anthropologie, Bd. ii. Hft. 1. 110.