Observations placeholder
Jacquetta Hawkes – A Land – Sea urchins
Identifier
021707
Type of Spiritual Experience
Background
A description of the experience
Jacquetta Hawkes – A Land
Midway in time between these contemporaries of our own and their earliest Ordovician ancestors, sea-urchins were abundant in the Cretaceous period and left the Chalk full of their neat fossil cones with fine inscribed lines radiating from the apex. Because their shape and these rays made them natural symbols, the Bronze Age peoples of Britain had magical uses for them, sometimes burying them with the dead. On Dunstable Down in a grave cut into the Chalk itself, a Bronze Age man was buried lying crouched within a ring of scores of fossil sea urchins.