Radiocarbon Dates from Carsington Pasture Cave, Brassington, Derbyshire

A.T. Chamberlain, Department of Archaeology and Prehistory, University of Sheffield, Northgate House, West Street, Sheffield, S1 4ET, U.K. email: a.chamberlain@shef.ac.uk

Introduction
Carsington Pasture Cave was investigated in 1998/1999 by archaeologists from the University of Sheffield, in collaboration with members of the Pegasus Caving Club. An interim report of the investigation has been published in a previous issue of CAPRA (Chamberlain, 1999). Carsington Pasture Cave contained faunal remains from domestic and wild mammalian species together with human remains representing a minimum of 20 individuals. This note summarises the results of radiocarbon determinations on two human bones and one animal bone from the cave.

Samples
The human bones were selected in order to provide dates for the accumulation of human skeletal remains on the surface of the floor deposits in the second chamber (Chamberlain, 1999: Figure 2) and for one of the cut-marked human femurs recovered from deposits between the second and the third chamber (Chamberlain, 1999: Figure 4). A proximal fragment of the left humerus of an aurochs, Bos primigenius, recovered from deposits between the second and third chambers, was also submitted for dating. This specimen has been included in a recent study of cattle mitochondrial DNA (Troy et al, 2001) and the dating was undertaken as part of a study of genetic diversity in Bos primigenius.

Results
The radiocarbon determinations are summarised in the table below. The human bone from the surface of the deposits in the second chamber (CPC-98-103) dates to the early Iron Age, while the cut-marked femur from the underlying deposits (CPC-98-314) dates to the late Neolithic or early Bronze Age. The aurochs bone dates to the early Neolithic.

Discussion
The radiocarbon determinations on the human bones from Carsington Pasture Cave indicate a minimum of two periods of deposition of human remains in the cave, separated in time by about 2000 years. The dates are consistent with the stratigraphy of the cave sediments, as the material on the surface of the floor deposits in the second chamber is younger than material excavated from within the deposits.

The cut-marked human femur CPC-98-314 is one of a two paired femurs from the same individual, both of which show multiple cut-marks consistent with disarticulation of the body at the knee joints. Disarticulation of human bodies is a well established occurrence recorded from late Neolithic and early Bronze age burials (Ashbee, 1960: 79; Thomas, 1999: 137-139). A close parallel to the instance referred to here has been described at a barrow cemetery at Shrewton in Wiltshire, where a body interred in Barrow 5k had been truncated just above the knee caps before being inserted into a burial pit (Green and Rollo-Smith, 1984: 278).

Acknowledgements
The radiocarbon dating was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council and was carried out at the Oxford Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit.

References
Ashbee, P. 1960. The Bronze Age Round Barrow in Britain. London: Phoenix House.

Chamberlain, A.T. 1999. Carsington Pasture Cave, Brassington, Derbyshire: a Prehistoric Burial Site. Capra 1 available at http://capra.group.shef.ac.uk/1/carsing.html

Green, C. and Rollo-Smith, S. 1984. The excavation of eighteen round barrows near Shrewton, Wiltshire. Proceedings of the Prehistoric Society 50: 255-318.

Thomas, J. 1999. Understanding the Neolithic. London: Routledge.

Troy, C.S., MacHugh, D.E., Bailey, J.F., Magee, D.A., Loftus, R.T., Cunningham, P., Chamberlain, A.T., Sykes, B.C. and Bradley, D.G. 2001. Bovine mtDNA variation and the Near Eastern origins of European pastoralism. Nature 410: 1088-1091.