| has gloss | eng: A treetrunk coffin, hollowed out of a single massive log, is a feature of some prehistoric elite burials over a wide range especially in Northern Europe as far east as the Balts, who abandoned cremation about the first century CE, and in central Lithuania, buried their elite in treetrunk coffins . The practice survived Christianization into the Middle Ages. The coffin in which the body of King Arthur was said to have been discovered, at Glastonbury Abbey in 1191, was described by the contemporary chronicler Giraldus Cambrensis as being of a massive oak treetrunk. For Bronze Age Britain, examples have been recorded at Wydon Eals, near Haltshistle, and at Cartington, Co. Durham, in Scotland, Yorkshire, East Anglia (Liss, northeast Hampshire, for instance). In Yorkshire, "Gristhorpe Man", a well-preserved human of the second millennium BCE, who was found 10 July 1834 under an ancient burial mound buried in a hollow oak tree trunk, is conserved at the Rotunda Museum, Scarborough: he was wrapped in an animal skin with a whalebone and bronze dagger and food for his journey. At the the abbey of Munsterbilzen, Belgium, ten graves with massive treetrunk coffins were discovered in 2006. |
