cure 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).