 incorporates a smooth unmodified portion of the articular surface of the metatarsal. The drilled perforation is 2 mm in diameter and is positioned 10 mm from the proximal end. The pin appears to have been crafted using stone tools, and it is comparable with similar artefacts found in Bronze Age burial mounds in Derbyshire and in East Yorkshire. The flint artefact is a cortical flake on translucent grey flint exhibiting a clear striking platform and a bulb of percussion. The dimensions of the flake are 34mm from striking platform to distal end, 23mm maximum breadth and 4mm maximum thickness.
Figure 5: Bone pin recovered from deposits in floor of 2nd Chamber
The worked antler (Figure 6 ) is the basal 150 mm of the beam of a naturally shed left side adult red deer antler with part of the brow tine and an incipient bez tine. The artefact has three deep parallel grooves characteristic of the ‘groove and splinter’ method of antler-working as described and illustrated by Clark & Thompson (1953). In this technique, longitudinal blanks with a triangular cross section are prepared using a sharp stone instrument to score parallel V-sectioned grooves through the hard outer wall of the antler. The grooves are positioned so as to follow the natural longitudinal furrows in the surface of the antler, and often three or four separate splinters were cut from a single antler beam. The specimen from Carsington Pasture Cave is broken distally, but a length of about 100 mm of the grooves is preserved including their shallow terminations close to the base of the antler. Two of the grooves penetrate almost as far as the medullary cavity of the antler, and the preparation of the splinter must therefore have been near completion. The edges of these grooves are contiguous and define a splinter with a steep triangular cross-section that is about 8 mm broad on its interior margin. The third groove is positioned on the posterior surface of the antler about 15 mm from the nearer of the two completed grooves. The third groove is about 3 mm deep and was therefore incomplete when the artefact was discarded. Fine incised striations curving away from the margins of the grooves show where the stone tool slipped during the process of shaping the grooves.
Figure 6: Antler worked with the groove and splinter technique
Figure 7: A selection of antler "combs" from Neolithic sites in Britain.
Caution must be exercised when attempting to apply typological dates to worked bone and antler, as some manufacturing techniques have changed little over the last 35,000 years, and the groove and splinter technique in particular has been documented from the Upper Palaeolithic right through to present-day arctic hunter-gathering cultures (Clark & Thompson, 1953). Within Europe, antler working using the groove and splinter technique is recorded at Late Glacial and Early Post-glacial sites in Spain, France and Germany, but in Britain the closest parallel to this artefact is the "antler comb", an object encountered on several Neolithic sites (Figure 7 Above).
Discussion and Conclusion
The presence of human remains in Carsington Pasture Cave is consistent with the widespread prehistoric practice of cave burial (Chamberlain, 1996), but in the absence of stratified artefacts or radiocarbon dating evidence it is impossible to determine when the remains were placed in the cave, or even whether multiple episodes of deposition may have occurred. The stalagmite formation covering several of the human bones is suggestive of an early date, but speleothem deposits can develop rapidly in some cave systems and cannot be relied upon as an indication of antiquity. Preliminary examination of the fauna in the cave suggests that the human remains have a maximum age of early Neolithic (about 4000 B.C.), but they are equally likely to date to the later prehistoric period. The few artefacts recovered from the cave suggest a wide range of dates (from Neolithic to post-medieval), but none of the artefacts are necessarily associated with the deposition of the human remains and this highlights the inse