It would be highly undesirable to press the facts further than is necessary to appeal for a suspended verdict. The “face-to-sun” hypothesis was never meant to be more than a possible explanation, but it has the virtue of accounting for many instances in which the skeleton lies, not due East and West, or North and South, but obliquely, at some intermediate horizon. And, at least, the alinement of the head, if not the face, towards the sun, is not peculiarly a British feature of prehistoric burials. Among the Tlingits, or Tlinkits, of South Alaska, the corpse was buried with the head towards the sun, so as to allow the soul of the deceased person to return; if the body were laid in the contrary direction, the spirit could never come back. Professor Frazer, who records this custom, asserts that other totemistic peoples inter their dead, according to fixed rules, with the head towards particular points of the compass. Professor E. B. Tylor has also collected abundant testimony corroborative of such customs. In places widely sundered geographically there has existed a strong desire to bury the dead “in the path of the sun[626].” Recently, too, Dr A. W. Howitt has discovered, just in time, at the Australian station of Wotjo, an isolated tribe which still preserves the custom. The arrangement of the head of the corpse is determined by the class and totem of the deceased person, and the direction is fixed by reference to the rising sun. The practice is nearing extinction, for, although Dr Howitt was able to secure sufficient information from the natives to construct a kind of burial compass, they could give him no reason for the varying dispositions. The only explanation proffered was: “Oh, that is what our fathers told us.” Such a man was buried in such a way because he was “nearer to us” than the others[627]. The folk-memory of this tribe will soon become a mere echo of tradition, and the task of reconstructing these primitive burial customs will grow increasingly difficult as each aboriginal patch of the earth’s surface becomes influenced by civilization.
Respecting graves themselves, we readily perceive that a round barrow, from its very nature, cannot be normally oriented. But in the British long barrows, usually accepted as the earlier kind, the long axis generally runs East and West. The broader end of the mound, where the sepulchral deposit is, as a rule, discovered, is directed towards the East[628]. So that, during the Neolithic period, some broad principle of orientation was observed, the constraining motive being probably connected with sun-worship.