Sometimes, you just don’t want to know the truth do you. But I’m good at believing several incompatible things at once. So I think I can retain heart and inspiration from the fossil sea urchin illustration. But whilst now discovering that it is a Lie!!
James F. Dyer wrote to the Luton News (12 August, 1954) to explain. He says the Five Knolls used to be ten knolls. In 1887 two of them were completely levelled by a “steam cultivator.” Worthington Smith excavated those two, and in 1890 he gave a lecture about them. It sounds like he wasn’t even there when the bones were uncovered and the farm labourers had already cleared lots away. WS said in the lecture, “Now the girl who was buried on the Downs had twelve of these (fossilised sea urchins) buried with her, presumably to preserve her in her sleep from the attacks of demons. In the earth that was thrown out of the entire tumulus, 91 additional fossil ‘echini’ were found.”
So all those other sea urchins might just have been naturally in the soil. How dull. But that would be a lot of sea urchins, surely?
Dyer goes on: “As my friend Leslie Grinsell (undoubtedly the leading authority on barrows in Britain) has said, ‘The essential fact regarding the ritual behind placing even a dozen micrasters in the grave remains unaltered; they were obviously regarded as possessing some protective power, about which new light may be forthcoming after the Barton Barrow excavations in September. But that Smith’s drawing has taken considerable licence, there is no doubt, and that in none of the four copies of the drawing published in his life-time, did he attempt to make it clear that the drawing was merely an imaginative reconstruction’.”
Well. It’s a bloody good drawing. Even if I feel somewhat let down.