p 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 insecure nature of cave deposits, which often consist of a palimpsest of different phases of activity that took place at widely separated time intervals. Radiocarbon dating is being planned to establish the date of deposition of the human remains.
A remarkable number of individuals are represented in the assemblage of human remains recovered from the cave, and it is likely that many more human bones would be discovered if the cave was fully excavated. Within the Peak District only Ravencliffe Cave has yielded a comparable number of human remains. This site, excavated early in the twentieth century by W. Storrs Fox, contained an estimated 20 individuals together with Later Neolithic, Bronze Age and Romano British artefacts. Unfortunately the size of the human skeletal assemblage at Carsington Pasture Cave does not provide any indication of its date, as large assemblages of human remains in caves are characteristic of both the earlier and later prehistoric periods in Britain. The presence of cutmarks on the human skeletal remains is particularly unusual, and is reminiscent of the marks discovered on Late Glacial human remains at Gough’s Cave in Somerset (Cook, 1991) and marks recently discovered on human remains from the Neolithic site of Hambledon Hill (McKinley, personal communication).