Today’s image for Day 249 of VM_365 shows the Manston Beaker burial under excavation in 1987.

The burial was contained within a grave located centrally within a roughly oval shaped barrow. The crouched skeleton of a slightly built young adult was accompanied by a long-necked beaker, a flint knife and a jet button. The picture on the right hand side shows the burial during excavation with the beaker on the left side of the pelvis.

A secondary crouched burial had also been inserted on the inner edge of the ring ditch to the south of the central grave.

The central grave had apparently been disturbed, possibly by a later burial  inserted into the barrow mound, maybe during the Anglo Saxon period, as parts of the skull were missing and a fragment of femur unrelated to this skeleton was found in the backfill above.

Radiocarbon dating carried out on the right femur of the skeleton dates the burial to 1680±50 bc (2132-1922 years BC) which places it at the beginning of the early Bronze Age.