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In the early years of the nineteenth century, William Cunnington and Sir Richard Colt Hoare explored hundreds of barrows on the Wiltshire downs in their neighbourhood. Those on Normanton Down, within sight of Stonehenge, are amongst the most celebrated, not least because they yielded some spectacular grave goods of Early Bronze Age date. For Hoare they formed 'a noble group of barrows ... diversified in their forms, perfect in their symmetry, and rich in their contents'.1 The bicentenary of the successful opening in September 1808 of Bush Barrow (Wilsford G5) - the most famous of the group - provides us with a convenient opportunity to celebrate the achievement of those pioneer excavators.2 This paper is doubly opportune given recent fresh study of the varied grave goods as part of a wider research programme, allowing radical reassessment of their significance.3
Although there have been many more excavations of barrows in the Stonehenge region since Cunnington and Hoare's campaign,4 there has been little further investigation of Normanton Down. Wilsford G11 was re-opened by John Thurnam, who was keen to recover the crania of the buried individuals that the former excavators had re-interred,5 and the only more modern excavation was that of a Neolithic long mortuary enclosure on the southern flank of the Down by Faith de Mallet Vatcher.6 The ploughed area around the barrows has also been fieldwalked (see below). Although this gives important background information, it has little direct relevance to the development of the Early Bronze Age cemetery. Later twentieth-century excavations of Early Bronze Age monuments in locations close to Normanton Down have taken place,7 and these sites, which give invaluable detailed context for the composition and contents of local barrows, have been taken into the study area for a complementary paper.8
Despite the lack of modern barrow excavation on Normanton Down itself, a considerable amount can still be drawn from the records left by Cunnington and Hoare. The richer grave groups have always commanded much attention and have often been seen as exemplars of broader regional or national phenomena: they were central to Stuart Piggott's 'Wessex Culture'; Arthur ApSimon applied the name 'Bush Barrow' to a particular series of daggers and Colin Burgess referred to a 'Bush Barrow...