Between and , a group of Yorkshire antiquaries investigated a monument at Arras Farm, near Market Weighton, in East Yorkshire. Their discoveries included two burials containing the remains of chariots. Exactly years later, in , another chariot burial was found at Burnby Lane, Pocklington, some seven miles north-west of Arras Farm see CA , and another followed in , at The Mile, a different site on the northern edge of Pocklington. The latter grave was particularly spectacular because the chariot had been buried intact and the two horses pulling it were interred in a standing position, while the male occupant of the grave had been laid on the floor of the chariot, on top of a highly decorated shield.
These astonishing interments are characteristic of what Vere Gordon Childe described as the Arras Culture, named after the place — once a medieval village but now reduced to a farm and a few cottages — where the first chariot burials were found. Then in , the bicentenary year of the first excavation, a remote-sensing survey of some 23ha around the farm found evidence for around barrows.
All have now been levelled by agricultural activity, but they can still be seen clearly in satellite, drone, and aerial photography after the Arras Farm fields have been freshly ploughed. Thousands of square barrows have now been recorded in eastern Yorkshire, mainly as cropmarks forming large cemeteries, and more than 1, have been excavated, with particular concentrations around the villages of Wetwang and Garton.
Chariot burials are the exception, though: in most cases, the deceased was interred with a shield, and sword and decorated sheath. Careful examination suggests that some of the spears were in fact carefully placed in the grave, though, and that some had been symbolically broken first. Not all of the people buried in this fashion were male: some of the most elaborately decorated chariot fittings have come from the graves of women, including two of the four Wetwang Farm burials excavated in and see CA 51 and Such rich and complex funerary rites contained within a well-defined landscape between the Humber, the Ouse, and the North Yorkshire moors encouraged Vere Gordon Childe and others to point to the similar burial rites of the people of the Aisne-Marne region of northern France and the Belgian Ardennes.
Christopher Hawkes went further in seeing the Arras Culture as evidence. Naturally, it was concluded that they must be related to the Parisii of northern France, after whom the French capital is named. Fraser Hunter, for example, warns against the trap of thinking that chariots were only made and used in East Yorkshire.
