lowstone ceiling. The 3rd Chamber showed evidence of prior entry by lead miners in the form of a dug trench through silt deposits, hob-nailed boot prints, pick marks on the cave walls and the bowl of a clay pipe. It has not been established how the miners gained access to this chamber, as there was no evidence for lead mining activity within the 2nd Chamber. It is possible that a mine shaft or adit breached the 3rd Chamber but if this was the case the point of entry must now be concealed by debris.
In 1999 a new excavation in the floor of the Entrance Chamber led to the discovery of further chambers of the cave system extending in a northerly direction. Both faunal remains and a small number of human remains are present in this part of the cave system, as well as prehistoric and Roman pottery and a few Roman coins.
The locations of human remains recovered from the 2nd Chamber are indicated on Figure 2 above. A minimum number of 20 individuals is represented in the assemblage and the demography of the sample suggests that all ages and adults of both sexes are included (Table 1, see below). The frequency of recovery of human remains declines as one moves vertically downwards through the cave system: of the 115 skeletal elements recovered, 66 (58%) were located on the floor of the second chamber and 38 (34%) were recovered from the excavation of the shaft between the second and third chambers. Only 6 human skeletal elements have been retrieved from the deep shaft excavated below the floor of the third chamber. This spatial pattern confirms initial impressions that the primary context for the deposition of the human remains was located in or adjacent to the second chamber, with the distribution in the lower parts of the cave system resulting from carnivore disturbance and/or partial collapse of the cave sediments. Within the second chamber there is a non-random spatial distribution of skeletal remains, with all of the neonatal remains being clustered near the centre of the chamber (Figure 2 above).
Table 1: Age and Sex Structure of the Human Remains from Carsington Pasture Cave.
The skeletal parts recovered are dominated by cranial remains together with some of the larger parts of the postcranial skeleton. Smaller bones are almost entirely absent: no hand bones, only a single foot bone and very few vertebrae have been recovered. This pattern is not attributable to degradation of bone tissue, as the state of preservation of all of the human and faunal remains is excellent. A similar pattern of loss of small sized skeletal elements is seen among the faunal remains, and it is possible that the smaller skeletal elements have either fallen out of sight between the larger boulders of the cave infill or have simply not been detected during the exploration of the cave. An alternative explanation for the pattern of skeletal part representation is that bodies were defleshed and disarticulated outside the cave, or in as-yet unexplored parts of the cave system, and only parts of the skeleton were then brought into the 2nd chamber. However, some of the individuals originally must have been deposited within the cave as intact or at least partially articulated skeletons: in the excavated area below the second chamber the hip bones, sacra and lower lumbar vertebrae of two individuals were discovered in close proximity. Similarly some of the neonatal remains in the second chamber include partial skeletons with cranial and postcranial remains from the same individual.
Movement of fragments of the same individual within the cave system is demonstrated by the spatial distribution of parts of a single skull, which were separated by a distance of 3.5 m within the second chamber. In all cases the mandibles were separated from the crania, but the damage to the facial bones of the crania has prevented successful cross matching of mandibles to the upper jaws of the same individuals. A number of the human remains exhibit damage caused by medium-sized carnivores (probably foxes, dogs or wolves). Some long bones show characteristic gnawing damage to the