Duggleby Howe

The barrow lies within a roughly circular enclosure, approximately 370 metres in diameter, formed from interrupted ditches, and open to the south.

Beginning on 21 July 1890 J. R. Mortimer, under the sponsorship of Sir Tatton Sykes, excavated "an area of 40 feet square over the centre of the barrow, and a portion of the east side" over a period of more than six weeks.

This excavation was re-assessed by Ian Kinnes, Timothy Schadla-Hall, Paul Chadwick and Philip Dean in 1983 to produce the interpretation presented below.

Kinnes and his colleagues see Duggleby Howe as a cemetery used over a long period of time, representing a stratified funerary sequence for the Late Neolithic.

Roy Loveday has suggested, as did J. R. Mortimer, that in fact the many burials may represent instead a sacrifice to mark the death of a powerful figure, perhaps the individual found at the base of the original shaft grave.

Mortimer's excavation technique, although good for the time, did not record the archaeological stratigraphy sufficiently well to allow this question to be settled.