THE NEOLITHIC AGE
[Sidenote: The early neolithic immigrants.]
No one can say how long after the close of the Ice Age the first
neolithic immigrants appeared;[209] nor can it even be positively
affirmed that in Northern Britain the last glacier had then melted
away. If they sailed across the Dover Strait, it was, as we have
seen, extremely narrow; and we can hardly be sure that it existed
at all.[210] Neolithic hunters, who may not have belonged to the
earliest horde, roamed in forests which now lie buried beneath the
Bristol Channel and the waves that break upon the Land’s End;[211]
and from the depths at which their remains have been dug up it may be
reasonably inferred that Southern Britain then extended at least as far
as the line which is marked upon our maps and charts by the ten-fathom
contour. But while in England the land stood above the modern level, in
Scotland it lay below; for along the margin of the fifty-foot raised
beach there are heaps of refuse left by men who lived at a time when
the estuary of the Forth ran up to Falkirk, and the lands which form
the Carse of Stirling were submerged:[212] dug-out canoes have been
found embedded in the basin of the Clyde more than twenty feet above
the present high-water mark;[213] and in a cave which was discovered
by quarrymen in a cliff facing the bay of Oban, a hundred yards from
the existing beach, dwelled hunters and fishermen, whose mode of
life is attested by their deer-horn harpoons, the remains of the oxen
and deer on which they partly subsisted, and the bone pins with which
they fastened their clothing.[214] The character of the relics has led
experts to the conclusion that the people to whom they belonged were
among the earliest of the neolithic inhabitants of Western Europe;
indeed it may be that they were descendants of a British or a Pyrenaean
palaeolithic stock. The harpoons are of the same type as those which
in the caves of South-Western France are assigned to the close of
the Palaeolithic Age and to a time of transition between it and the
following epoch, and which in recognized neolithic deposits have never
been found either in Britain or in Gaul; and the general aspect of the
Scottish and the Gaulish remains is virtually the same.[215] There are,
moreover, other indications that the British Neolithic Age began long
before the period to which the great majority of the antiquities that
lie in our museums belong. A few years ago there were brought to light
traces of a settlement which some primitive clan had formed on the bank
of a stream that flows through Blashenwell Farm, hard by Corfe Castle.
These settlers had lived in great part upon limpets, which they must
have eaten raw, since the broken shells showed no trace of fire: they
did not till the soil; they had no domestic animals and no pottery;
and their tools were of the rudest kind.[216] Moreover, besides the
implements that lay beneath the submerged forests, there have been
found in the bed of the Trent, and in the Ham Marshes, thirty feet
below the surface, skulls which are so far different from those that
have been recovered from barrows and cairns as to suggest that the
oldest neolithic invaders may have belonged to another stock.[217]
[Sidenote: The origins of British civilization were neolithic.]
But whoever they may have been, whatever the date of their arrival, it
was an era since which the history of this country has been continuous.
Their descendants are with us still: they or later comers brought with
them the seeds of cereals and plants which are cultivated still, and
animals the descendants of which still stock our farms; they practised
handicrafts and arts from which the industries of modern Britain have
been in part evolved.[218]
[Sidenote: Geography of neolithic Britain.]
The subsidence which is proved by the submerged forests was going on
throughout the Neolithic Age, and only ceased about three thousand
years ago. While the forests were insensibly sinking, the valleys
that stretched behind them were flooded by the advancing sea, which
penetrated through the chalk downs into the Weald in long fiords, and
doubtless often carried the canoes of the later invaders.[219] But we
cannot fix even approximately the period at which these people began to
arrive.[220] All that can be said is that it was many centuries before
the Bronze Age, which probably began in this country about eighteen
hundred years before the Christian era.[221]
[Sidenote: Who were the later neolithic invaders?]
These hordes doubtless set out from various parts of northern Gaul; but
to determine their origin is perhaps impossible.[222] The skeletons
that have been exhumed from the neolithic tombs of England, Scotland,
and Ireland, except some which were interred in the very latest period,
when invaders of a widely different race were beginning to arrive,
belong, for the most part, to the same general type. All, or almost
all, had long narrow skulls: their faces were commonly oval, their
features regular, and their noses aquiline: most of them were of middle
height, and their limbs, as a rule, were rather delicate than robust.
Men with the same physical characters lived contemporaneously in
Gaul and the Spanish peninsula, and are still numerous in the basin
of the Mediterranean; and the race to which they belonged is often
called the Iberian, though there is no reason to believe that its
British representatives belonged to the Iberian rather than to some
other branch of the Mediterranean stock.[223] But it is remarkable
that while early in the Neolithic Age Gaul and Spain, as well as
Central Europe, were overrun by invaders of a totally different kind,
who were extremely short and sturdy and had broad round heads, there
is no evidence that men of this race reached Britain until the very
end of the period, and then only in comparatively small numbers.[224]
One would be inclined to infer that tribes of the Mediterranean stock
began to migrate into Britain before many of the round-headed race had
settled in Gaul. Vain attempts [Sidenote: Evidence from dolmens.] have
been made to trace the migration to its original starting-point by
the distribution of the dolmens, or rude stone sepulchres,[225] which
are found in many European countries. A dolmen, in the strict sense
of the word, is composed of large stones set on end, which wholly or
partially enclose a space, and are covered by other stones or by a
single stone, which rests upon their upper ends. Most of the chambers
in our chambered barrows virtually answer to this definition; and
if the enclosing mounds were removed, would appear as dolmens.[226]
Some few, however, as well as chambers which have been explored in
Brittany, were roofed over, like the so-called beehive huts, by layers
of stones, which, as they rose, gradually approached each other, the
highest supporting a flat slab whose weight kept them in place, while
the pressure of the superincumbent cairn or barrow gave solidity to
the whole.[227] But although the dolmens which are generally so called
may be older than the chambered barrows,[228] they also were almost
always covered or at least fenced by earthen mounds or cairns, which,
in many cases, were still visible little more than a century ago.[229]
There is no reason to suppose that in this country or in Ireland they
were built by tribes of a different stock: it is impossible to draw
a sharp distinction between the two classes of graves;[230] and for
our present purpose they may safely be grouped together. They abound
in Syria and Northern Africa, along the western side of the Spanish
peninsula, over nearly the whole area of France, in Northern Germany,
Wales[231] and the west of England, Ireland, South-Western and Northern
Scotland, Denmark, and Scandinavia. Some archaeologists conclude that a
dolmen-building race gradually moved westward from Syria, crossed the
Straits of Gibraltar, and thence passed through Spain and Gaul into
Britain; while others insist that the place of their departure was
Scandinavia. But it is not improbable that dolmens, which exist also
in India, Japan, and many other countries, and which might have been
built all over the world if stones had been everywhere available for
their construction, were not originally designed by any one people,
and that the resemblances which have been pointed out between those of
widely separated regions were simply due to the similarity with which
different tribes acted in similar circumstances. The neolithic skulls
and the neolithic sepulchral pottery of Scandinavia are unlike those
of Britain; while, on the other hand, the British dolmens belong to an
earlier stage of culture than those of Africa. Everything points to the
conclusion that the earliest dolmen-builders of Britain retreated from
Gaul before the sturdy round-headed invaders;[232] and it is useless
to inquire whether the Mediterranean stock, to which the British, like
the earlier French dolmen-builders, belonged, originated in Europe, in
Asia, or in Africa. We only know that the oldest traces of the race
were discovered in the Riviera.[233] Some philologists, however, affirm
that the modern Celtic dialects are distinguished by peculiarities of
syntax which show that they were influenced by contact with an older
language akin to the Hamitic dialects of Africa.[234]
[Sidenote: Relics of the neolithic population: their settlements.]
Relics of the neolithic population have been found over the whole
extent of Great Britain and in the adjacent islands, from Kent to
Cornwall, from the Isle of Wight to Shetland, not only in barrows
and cairns, but also in caves in which they lived and died, in the
neighbourhood of the quarries from which they obtained flint for
manufacturing their tools, in pit-dwellings, on the margins of lakes,
in the beds of rivers, in ditches, in peat-mosses, in sandy wastes
where the sand had been blown away from the soil which it had long
concealed, in fens, on open downs, and in fields by the accidental
impact of a plough. Their sepulchres, as we shall afterwards see,[235]
remain in comparatively few regions; but on the more cultivated lands
many have doubtless been destroyed. It is reasonable to suppose that
the settlements were made successively throughout a long period; and
that the earliest comers took possession of the choicest lands in
the south. Those who came later would displace their predecessors
if they had the power, and if the prize seemed worth a struggle:
otherwise they would move on to the nearest vacant lands; and so in
the course of ages, and after much bloodshed, the whole island came
to be occupied. But each successive horde found large tracts of the
country through which they plodded overgrown by forests or covered
by morasses; and they must often have had to travel far before they
could obtain a suitable abode. Except the gigantic Irish elk and the
wild ox known as the aurochs, which survived into the Bronze Age, and
which, later still, Caesar found roaming in the German forests,[236]
the great beasts which had lived in Britain with palaeolithic man were
no more; but brown bears and grizzly bears, beavers and wild cats,
still survived; herons, swans, and cormorants flitted over the fens;
red deer, wild boars, and even a few reindeer remained to supply the
new comers with game; and in every forest wolves were lurking to prey
upon their cattle.[237] If we were to mark upon a map all the places
at which neolithic implements have been found, it would correspond
more or less closely with one constructed _a priori_ by a geographer,
ignorant of the results of archaeological research, who appreciated
the requirements of early settlers. He would expect to find that they
had avoided as far as possible the toil of cutting down woods, and
that they had selected dry uplands, where the subsoil was porous and
their cattle could find pasture, and which overlooked river-valleys,
where they themselves could get water and fuel, and on the slopes of
which they could build sheltered dwellings. He would not therefore be
surprised to learn that the traces of occupation are most numerous
on the chalk downs, the Derbyshire moorlands, the Pennine Range and
the Yorkshire Wolds, the Malvern Hills, and other high lands which
fulfilled the necessary conditions.[238]
Without his tools the settler could not build his hut, cut his
firewood, or kill and dress a calf or a kid from his herd. Let us
therefore try to ascertain how he made them, and how far he had
improved as a craftsman upon the rude methods of his palaeolithic
predecessor.
[Sidenote: Flint mines and implement factories.]
Within the last half-century archaeologists have succeeded in revealing
some of the factories in which the prehistoric cutlers wrought. The
nature of their materials of course still depended upon the rocks which
were to be found in the district where they lived. Those who could
get no flint used quartzite, basalt, felstone, greenstone, porphyry,
diorite, or whatever stone they could obtain.[239] But flint was still
the staple material. The palaeolithic hunters were obliged, as we have
seen, to use stray blocks: their successors had learned how to win the
flint from the bed of chalk in which it lay. Among the chief centres
of mining and manufacture were Brandon in Suffolk and Cissbury, which
is on the South Downs, about three miles north of Worthing. Grime’s
Graves, the mines which supplied the famous factory of Brandon, are
situated in a fern-clad wood, and occupy more than twenty acres.
The so-called graves are circular shafts, about twenty-five feet in
diameter at the mouth, from thirty to fifty deep, and on an average
twenty-five feet apart. Most of them were connected by galleries, which
had been tunnelled in directions that followed the seams of the flint.
The tools with which the excavations were made were stone ‘celts’, or
hatchets, and picks made of the brow-tines of the antlers of reindeer.
Unlike modern picks they were one-sided; and a specimen encrusted with
chalk on which the owner’s finger-prints are still visible, is now
lying in the Prehistoric Room of the British Museum. More than one of
the lamps were found by the aid of which the workmen had groped their
way through the galleries,--small cups hollowed out of chalk, which
they had evidently filled with oil or fat and furnished with some kind
of wick.[240] When the flint had been hewn out with the hatchets,
which have left their marks upon the sides of the galleries, it was
hauled up to the surface, perhaps in baskets made of wicker or hide,
and carried to the workshops, where it was wrought into implements,
which were afterwards bartered for such articles as the manufacturers
required. Innumerable flakes and chips of waste flint were found, which
testified to their activity. One of them at least was a sculptor as
well. A fragment of a human limb, modelled out of chalk, was discovered
by the antiquary who first explored the site; and he tells us that the
anatomical features were ‘rendered with an accurate knowledge of the
parts’.[241] But what most impressed him was to find in one of the
galleries a set of tools lying upon a piece of unfinished work in the
position in which they had been laid some four thousand years ago.[242]
Walking through the wood to the open heath of Broomhill, he came to
the pits that yield the material which the ‘knappers’ of Brandon still
manufacture into gun-flints for African tribes. The industry has been
carried on since neolithic times, and even then it was ancient; for
Brandon was an abode of flint-workers in the Old Stone Age. Not only
the pits but even the tools show little change: the picks which the
modern workers use are made of iron, but here alone in Britain the old
one-sided form is still retained. Only the skill of the workers has
degenerated: the exquisite evenness of chipping which distinguished
the neolithic arrow-heads is beyond the power of the most experienced
knapper to reproduce.[243]
The flint works at Cissbury have a general resemblance to those of
Grime’s Graves; but the pits were sunk on a different principle.[244]
They are contained in an entrenchment which did not exist at the time
when the earliest were made, but was almost certainly constructed in
the Neolithic Age.[245] The extreme rudeness of the tools which were
found in them has led to the belief that they are older than Grime’s
Graves;[246] but, on the other hand, stone implements of the rudest
kind were manufactured for special purposes long after the Stone Age
had passed away.[247] Moreover, many of the ruder Cissbury tools appear
to be unfinished; and it may have been intended that they should be
perfected by the people with whom they were exchanged. Many of the
smaller pits contained not only stone implements but also fragments
of pottery and remains of horses, goats, deer, and horned cattle; and
from this Pitt-Rivers, who first explored them, concluded that they had
been used as dwellings after they had ceased to serve their purpose as
quarries, or had been inhabited by the workers who obtained their flint
from the larger pits. On this site also deer-horn picks were found; and
Pitt-Rivers, wishing to test their value, provided a set of similar
tools, with which he and one of the labourers whom he employed dug a
pit three feet square and three feet deep in an hour and a half.[248]
[Sidenote: Difficulty of determining age of stone implements.]
With the better material which was thus obtained the neolithic
craftsmen fashioned implements of which some can hardly be
distinguished, even by experts, from those of the older period, though
the greater number are recognizable even by a tiro. It must, however,
be remembered that in many cases one cannot tell whether a find of
stone implements belongs to the Neolithic or to the Bronze Age; and
some are probably later still. Indeed it would be impossible to point
to any kind of stone implements which ceased to be manufactured in
Britain when bronze was introduced.[249] [Sidenote: Indefiniteness of
the prehistoric ‘Ages’.] One of the first cautions which the student
of archaeology gives himself is that the epochs into which it has been
found convenient to divide the Prehistoric Period were not definitely
separated. It has been well said that they shade into one another like
the colours in the solar spectrum.[250] The age in which we are now
living affords an illustration. In one sense what might be called the
Mechanical Age began when the first motor-car appeared on a London
street; but we are still living in an era of transition, which will not
end until, if ever, horses shall have ceased to be used for traction.
Similarly stone tools continued to be used throughout the Bronze Age
and the Late Celtic Period; and in certain remoter parts of the British
Isles they are being used to-day.[251] When they are found associated
with primary interments in long barrows or chambered cairns, or when
they are met with in large numbers in other deposits which there is
no reason to assign to a later period, they may as a rule be safely
referred to the Neolithic Age; but, as we shall presently see,[252]
there are certain implements of stone which were undoubtedly used in
the Bronze Age, and of which it cannot be said with certainty that in
this country they were used before. Some interments, however, which are
ascribed to the Age of Bronze may have belonged to the older race, who
still remained in their neolithic age although they were glad to use
any bronze tools upon which they could lay their hands. Similarly the
grave of an Australian savage who was buried some sixty years ago was
found to contain, besides a piece of flint, a clay pipe, an iron spoon,
and the handle of a pocket-knife.[253]
[Sidenote: Stone implements.]
The several kinds of tools that first began to be used in the Neolithic
Age present numerous varieties of form which, in this book, it would
be irrelevant to describe. To deal with them is the province of
archaeology; and the reader who wishes to make himself acquainted with
them can do so, after he has mastered the literature of the subject,
by visiting the collections in our museums and by himself becoming
a collector. Here we desire only to learn so much as may help us to
understand how neolithic man lived, and from what origins the culture
which succeeded his was evolved.
The Neolithic Age is sometimes, especially on the other side of the
Channel, called the period of polished stone:[254] but most of our
flint implements were neither ground nor polished; they were merely
chipped. Many specimens indeed, from one cause or another, have never
received their finishing touches; but many others were of such a kind
that grinding or polishing would have been labour lost.[255]
[Sidenote: The two main divisions of flint implements.]
Neolithic flint implements may be grouped in two classes. In one, which
comprises the larger kinds--axes, hammer-stones, and the like--the
implement was made out of a block of flint, and the splinters struck
off during the process of manufacture were either mere waste or
utilized for making smaller tools.[256] The other class consists of
tools which were made out of flakes, the core, after all the required
flakes had been detached, being thrown away.[257]
[Sidenote: How flint implements were made.]
Flint fresh from the quarry was easier to manufacture; and accordingly
the cutlers established their workshops close by the mines. Their
methods were perhaps not everywhere the same; but it is easy to form a
general idea of them from observing the processes which are followed
by tribes which are still in their stone age and by the knappers who
ply their trade near Grime’s Graves. Sometimes, like the Cloud River
Indians, the workers may have applied a pebble or a punch of deer-horn
to the surface of the flint block, and produced flakes by striking it
with his stone hammer; but Sir John Evans believes that the flakes
were generally struck off with a hammer or a pebble alone; and he has
found experimentally that by this simple method a practised hand can
attain almost perfect precision. Laying the flakes which he had thus
removed with the flat face uppermost upon a smooth block of stone, he
has succeeded by blows of a pebble in chipping their ends into whatever
form he desired. Similarly hatchets were first rough-hewn by striking
splinters from the flint block, and afterwards gradually chipped into
the proper shape. Whether the material was flint or some other stone,
the method would have remained the same. When it was desired to attain
the utmost perfection, the implements were ground, not upon a revolving
but upon a fixed stone, and polished by stone rubbers in conjunction
with sand.[258] The process by which the arrow-heads and spear-heads
were manufactured, whose exquisite workmanship entrances all who see
them, cannot be described; for the modern tribes who make such weapons
work in various ways. Small stone tools, however, are often found, with
blunted ends, made out of thick flakes, which may have been used in
arrow-flaking, and which accordingly have been termed ‘fabricators’;
and as they are most numerous in the districts which have yielded the
greatest number of arrow-heads, the appellation is probably correct.
Arrow-heads have indeed been recently made with them, but with
somewhat obtuse edges; and it has therefore been suggested that the
fabricator was only used for removing irregularities from the flake,
and that the final chipping was accomplished with a tool of deer-horn,
which, pressed deftly against the edge of the flake, detached minute
splinters. The surface of many flint arrow-heads and javelin-heads is,
however, covered with beautifully uniform fluting, like ripple-marks on
sand; and the most experienced modern operators confess that they do
not understand how this effect was produced.[259]
[Illustration: FIG. 5. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 6. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 7.]
[Sidenote: Celts]
It may be well to enumerate the various tools which would have formed
a complete outfit for a neolithic household. The kinds which were
made from a block of stone were celts, which comprised hatchets and
adzes, and of which some may have been used as chisels and knives;
axes perforated for the insertion of a handle; chisels and gouges;
hammer-stones, pestles, and whetstones. Most readers are familiar with
the term ‘celt’; but not every one is aware that it has no connexion
with the name of the people who were the latest prehistoric invaders
of these islands, and is simply an Anglicized form of a Latin word,
meaning a chisel, which does not occur except in the Vulgate.[260]
Some celts were ground or polished only on the edge; some over their
whole surface; and a few are so exquisitely finished on both sides that
the labour which was devoted to them would have seemed excessive unless
it had been a labour of love.[261] On the other hand, many were neither
ground nor polished; and some of the ruder ones may have been used as
agricultural implements.[262] Several have been found with pointed
butts and extremely elongated oval sections, which have the closest
resemblance to celts from the West Indies, and illustrate the truth
of the observation that identity in form of implements, weapons, and
other objects belonging to widely separated lands does not necessarily
prove community of origin, but as a rule merely shows that similar
wants in similar circumstances produce similar results.[263] Although
those celts which were used as hatchets or adzes were evidently
mounted, there are some that show grooves on both sides or notches
on one side, which seem to have been intended to enable them to be
easily grasped.[264] Most of the handles, having been made of wood,
have naturally perished; but two hatchets, now in the British Museum,
have been found with their handles complete,--one in Solway Moss by
a man digging peat for fuel,[265] the other in the bed of a Cumbrian
lake called Ehenside Tarn.[266] Unlike the Swiss lake-dwellers, who
had learned to fix their blades in deer-horn sockets, which were
sufficiently elastic to prevent the wooden hafts from being injured by
concussion,[267] the makers of these hatchets had simply mounted them
in a hole which fitted the butt, but which, by the jar of repeated
blows, must soon have become split.[268]
[Sidenote: Their uses.]
[Illustration: FIG. 8.]
Like the stone hatchets of the Maoris, neolithic celts were doubtless
used not only for felling trees,[269] chopping firewood, and
slaughtering cattle, but also as battle-axes; and the profusion in
which the ruder kinds have been found at Cissbury and Grime’s Graves
shows that they also served as miners’ tools.[270]
[Sidenote: Chisels and gouges.]
Among the chisels some of the most interesting are small specimens,
which came from Suffolk and the Yorkshire Wolds, and which may have
been designed for wood-carving, and one from the Fen country, the end
of which is described as exactly like that of a narrow ‘cold chisel’ of
steel, used by engineers.[271] Gouges, which are abundant in Denmark
and Sweden, are very rare in this country. It has been suggested that
canoes, for making which they were perhaps chiefly used, were more
necessary in Scandinavia than in Britain; and it is significant that
the best British gouges all come from the fens, where canoes must have
been needed for crossing the floods.[272] It is probable, however, that
although gouges may have been used in finishing the vessels, the heavy
work of hollowing the trees out of which they were formed was largely
performed by the agency of fire, as among the North American Indians of
comparatively recent times.[273]
[Illustration: FIG. 9. ½]
[Sidenote: Axes, axe-hammers, anvils, and mullers.]
No stone implements are more familiar to students of antiquities
than the axes, axe-hammers, and hammers, in which, as in those of
our own day, holes were drilled for the insertion of handles. Many
of them were probably used as weapons of war. Some of the axes are
double-edged, though the edge is often blunted, as though it had been
intended rather for striking than for cutting; while the axe-hammers
resemble an ordinary hammer at one end, and are sharpened at the
other.[274] It would perhaps be impossible to prove that any of these
tools were used in Southern Britain in the Neolithic Age, although
they were not uncommon on the Continent;[275] and most of those
which are to be seen in our museums undoubtedly belong to the time
when bronze was common:[276] but some few have been found in Scotland
in chambered cairns.[277] Not one of them is made of flint.[278] Of
the implements which are known as hammer-stones some which have deep
cup-shaped depressions may have served as anvils or mortars; and others
again--quartzite pebbles or flint cores, which were found at Cissbury,
Grime’s Graves, and other places--were apparently used for chipping
flints. Some nearly globular stones, whose battered surfaces testify to
hard wear, were doubtless for triturating grain or edible roots.[279]
[Illustration: FIG. 10. ½]
[Sidenote: Implements made by flakes.]
The varieties of tools which have been made out of flakes are too
numerous to particularize. Simple flakes, flat or triangular in
section, varying in length from nine or ten inches to one inch, are the
most abundant of all stone implements, and are to be found in every
quarter of the globe. Here they are generally made of flint and are
rarely ground. Some of them may have been used as surgical instruments;
for, as we shall presently see, trepanning of the human skull was
practised in the Neolithic Age.[280] Others were made into saws, the
teeth of which are occasionally so fine that to the unaided eye they
are hardly visible.[281] Many, shaped like horse-shoes, ducks’ bills,
oyster-shells, or short spoons, or nearly round, were used for dressing
hides, for scraping haematitic iron ore in order to obtain the red
pigment which served primitive man as rouge,[282] and perhaps, in
conjunction with nodules of iron pyrites, for producing fire.[283] Some
were fashioned into awls and drills;[284] others into knives, daggers,
and curved blades, which may perhaps have [Sidenote: Javelin-heads
and arrow-heads.] been sickles.[285] But the most beautiful weapons
made out of flakes were javelin-heads and arrow-heads, which in this
country are almost always of flint. If British neolithic workmanship
did not on the whole reach the level of that of Denmark, in fashioning
missile weapons our armourers could hold their own. Whether any
given specimen was an arrow-head or a javelin-head, a javelin-head
or a spear-head, can generally be decided only by size. Many are
so small that no one can mistake the purpose for which they were
intended; but it is not certain whether the largest were attached to
spear-shafts, properly so called, or served as javelins. Arrow-heads
and javelin-heads may be grouped in four classes, each of which
has several varieties,--leaf-shaped, lozenge-shaped, stemmed, and
triangular; but some five or six arrow-heads have been picked up
whose outline was characterized by ogee curves. The stemmed heads are
generally, and the triangular, which are rare, occasionally barbed.
Although the various kinds were used contemporaneously, barbs were
perhaps of comparatively late invention,[286] and may have been evolved
in the struggle for existence as the population became more dense.[287]
Not a single barbed arrow-head or javelin-head has ever been found in a
long barrow;[288] but they occur in the chambered cairns of Scotland,
as well as in certain English round barrows which were erected towards
the end of the Neolithic Age;[289] and a fine specimen was associated
with many beautifully finished implements in a neolithic village at
West Wickham.[290] A leaf-shaped arrow-head was found in a peat-moss
at Fyvie, in Aberdeenshire, still fixed in a cleft in its shaft;
but the cord or sinew by which it had doubtless been secured had
disappeared.[291] Arrow-heads may also have been made of hardened wood
or bone, which holds poison better than flint.[292]
[Illustration: FIG. 11. ½]
[Illustration: FIG. 12.]
[Illustration: FIG. 13.]
[Illustration: FIG. 14.]
[Illustration: FIG. 15.]
[Sidenote: Bone implements.]
The archers of many countries use wrist-guards to protect their
arms against the recoil of the bowstring; and for this purpose the
prehistoric Britons made rectangular plates of stone or bone, curved to
fit their wrists and perforated near the angles with holes to enable
them to be fastened. Most of those which have been collected belonged
to the Bronze Age; but they probably came into use before.[293] Various
other implements of bone--awls, needles, chisels, and perhaps daggers
and lance-heads--were also common in the Neolithic Age;[294] and it is
worth noticing that a well-known collector has found palaeolithic tools
which, as his practised eye discerned, had been picked up and reflaked
by neolithic men.[295]
[Sidenote: Pygmy flints.]
Of all stone implements the most curious are the tiny objects which are
known as ‘pygmy flints’, and which have been found not only in certain
parts of Britain[296] and Ireland,[297] but also in France, Belgium,
Spain, North Africa and Egypt, Palestine and India. They are all made
of minute flakes; and in one of our collections the marks of working
could not be detected without the aid of a microscope, while sixty-four
specimens, many of which were no more than a quarter of an inch long,
weighed less than half an ounce. Numerous guesses, which need not be
repeated, have been made as to their use. Everywhere their forms are
identical; and, partly for this reason, partly because in many places
no other implements were associated with them, it has been supposed
by lovers of the marvellous that they were the work of a peculiar
race.[298] If the latter reason were valid, we should be compelled to
assume that the Lilliputians had sent out many colonies from the land
where Gulliver found them. But every archaeologist knows that tools and
other articles of identical form are to be found in divers continents;
and pygmy flints may often have lain with others and have escaped
observation.
[Sidenote: Specialization of industries.]
A survey of the implements and other relics arranged in a
representative collection teaches us that men had already learned the
necessity of a division of labour. Some clans who used flint implements
could only have obtained them by barter. Even in the great factories
of Grime’s Graves and Cissbury the miners were evidently distinct from
the cutlers, as were both from the herdsmen. But in other settlements,
where mining and cutlery were apparently not predominant industries,
implements have been found of such perfect finish that their
manufacture would seem to have been the special or the sole occupation
of skilled members of the community.[299]
[Sidenote: A lost art.]
But there was one thing which the forerunner of neolithic man had
done, and which he could not do. Among his relics we may look in vain
for the carved dagger-handles, the engraved antlers, and the other
works of art of the palaeolithic caves. Except in Grime’s Graves, not
a single attempt to portray the human figure, or animal, or plant
has ever been found among the deposits of the Neolithic Age. If the
artists of Derbyshire and Aquitaine had left descendants, perhaps they
were massacred or enslaved, perhaps their individuality withered under
oppression: whatever may have been the cause, the old creative art was
dead.[300]
[Sidenote: Dwellings.]
Provided with their tools, the neolithic herdsmen were able to
construct dwellings which, humble as they were, must have been
comfortable in comparison with the shelters that had satisfied the
hunters of the older time. Unfortunately, however, the evidence
relating to the domestic life of the neolithic people is far less
complete than that which has been preserved in regard to their Swiss
contemporaries. In that age and for many centuries after it had come to
an end the inhabitants of northern and western Europe, like the ancient
Romans whom Horace[301] eulogized, were content to live in habitations
which were small and mean, while, under the influence of superstitious
terror as much as of reverence, they constructed the mansions of
their dead chieftains on a magnificent scale. Thus, while neolithic
sepulchres are still conspicuous upon the western hills, few buildings
have left traces which can be referred with absolute certainty to the
same period.[302] Many of the ‘hut-circles’ and pit-dwellings which
have been excavated contain no trace of metal; but it is generally
impossible, in any given instance, to dismiss all doubts as to their
antiquity when we find others, precisely similar, which were certainly
occupied, if not built, by people who used implements of bronze. Still
it is not credible that such dwellings were constructed for the first
time after the introduction of metal working; and it is reasonable to
believe that they were common before the earliest bronze implement was
imported into Britain. Indeed a pit-dwelling has been found at the
eastern end of a long barrow near the village of Hanging Grimston on
the Yorkshire Wolds; and, as it was proved by excavation to be older
than the barrow,[303] it must have been dug in the Neolithic Age.
There were of course villages of some sort at Cissbury and Grime’s
Graves; and at Grovehurst, near Sittingbourne, are the remains of
huts which were occupied by implement-makers.[304] A group of pits on
the sheltered southern slope of Croham Hurst, about a mile south of
Croydon, the fields near which are thickly strewn with flint flakes,
probably formed the winter abode of a small community:[305] on Hayes
Common a village has been explored, comprising about one hundred and
sixty pits, the period of which was determined by the discovery of
a neolithic workshop, on the floor of a pit of identical form, at
Millfield in the immediate neighbourhood; and the neolithic age of
a settlement at West Wickham was as clearly proved by the nature of
the implements.[306] At these places, at Weybourne in Norfolk, on
the Hampshire Downs, and elsewhere, the sites of such dwellings are
indicated by circular depressions, ranging in diameter from six to
thirty feet and from two to six feet deep, which, though they generally
occur in groups, are sometimes isolated. Each is surrounded by a bank,
formed of the excavated earth, in which the entrance is marked by a
gap. The bank was in certain cases prevented from falling in by a stone
circle; and upon it was reared a hut, sometimes perhaps formed of
stones, but more often of interlaced boughs, while the roof, in which
a hole was left for the escape of smoke, was probably thatched with
fern or heather or turf, and, if it happened to be large, supported
by a pole or the trunk of a tree, the position of which seems to be
indicated by a mound in the centre of the pit.[307] A cluster of huts
was apparently sometimes surrounded by an entrenchment, which protected
the inhabitants and their cattle from night attacks.[308] Rude as these
structures were, they fulfilled their purpose. The soil on which they
were built was generally dry: the pit not only ensured warmth but also
enabled the roof to be carried to a sufficient height: the bank, by
throwing off the rain, kept the interior dry; and while in certain
cases the remains of a hearth made of flints are found in the centre,
in others it would seem that cooking was performed outside. Thus one
group of pits on Hayes Common, the dimensions of which are within
the ordinary range, is associated with smaller depressions, which
apparently contained cooking-hearths.[309] A small fire might have been
safely lighted inside the hut to warm the inmates; but a large one,
such as would have been necessary for cooking a joint or an entire hare
or sucking-pig, might have ignited the inflammable roof.[310]
A remarkable group of pits has recently been excavated in
Wigtownshire.[311] Piles had been driven into them to support a wooden
floor, the object of which was doubtless to keep them dry; and the
marks on the piles seemed to their discoverer to show that they had
been cut with stone hatchets.[312]
Three entirely subterranean chambers, of a kind which has been met
with nowhere else in the British Isles, have lately been discovered by
navvies who were digging a sewer-trench at Waddon, near Croydon. They
were about twelve feet in diameter and seven feet high; and although
they contained fragments of Romano-British pottery, the flint flakes
and blocks which lay upon the floors were assigned by the experienced
antiquary who explored them[313] to the Age of Stone. While he was
impressed by their exact resemblance to certain Portuguese neolithic
chambers which were used for burial,[314] he suggested that they might
also have served as shelters in times of excessive heat or cold.
Unlike their Swiss contemporaries, who built their huts on platforms,
supported by piles driven into the beds of lakes, the neolithic Britons
lived mainly if not exclusively on land. Lake-dwellings indeed abound
in the British Isles; but exploration shows that almost all were
erected in the Late Celtic Period; and the only one in Britain which
can with any show of reason be referred to the Age of Stone is in
Holderness, which, before it was drained, was covered with marshes and
shallow meres. One of a group of five, called the West Furze dwelling,
contained a large number of flint flakes: but a bronze spear-head was
also found in it; and the evidence is not sufficient to show that it
was built in a pre-metallic period.[315]
[Sidenote: Food and cookery.]
The food of the neolithic population has left more abundant traces
than their homes. The bones which are strewed in their sepulchres and
settlements show that they lived in great part on venison and the flesh
of the wild boar;[316] and the skull of an aurochs, which was found in
the Fen country with a stone weapon sticking in it,[317] proves that
they also followed the largest game. Unlike the palaeolithic hunters,
they used dogs in the chase; and it has been plausibly conjectured that
these animals were the first to be domesticated. For man was a hunter
before he was a herdsman; and the dog would soon begin to lick the hand
that rewarded it with a share of the slaughtered boar or deer.[318]
It would seem, however, that when with advancing age dogs had become
too slow for hunting, they were killed and eaten; for canine bones,
apparently of old animals, were found at Grime’s Graves.[319] Neolithic
immigrants introduced sheep,[320] goats, and pigs as well as horned
cattle; and all the bones of the latter which have been collected from
their refuse-heaps and graves were those of small oxen, the scientific
name of which--_Bos longifrons_--is familiar to all students of
antiquities, and which resembled their living descendants, the Kerry
cattle of Ireland and the small black animals of the Welsh mountains.
Some authorities believe that these and all our varieties of domestic
oxen are descended from the aurochs, which, as we have seen, was living
in this country in palaeolithic times, and suggest that its calves were
trapped and tamed;[321] while others maintain that _Bos longifrons_
was introduced by neolithic immigrants. The extreme smallness of the
prehistoric domestic oxen is as easily accounted for as that of the
mountain cattle of the present day. The tribes who kept them had but
limited pasturage: forage in winter was probably scanty; and the
milk which was needed by their calves was largely consumed by their
owners.[322] The broken bones of cattle which were found at Grime’s
Graves belonged to very young animals, which the implement-makers who
bred them evidently could not afford to rear.[323] The meat was boiled
in rude hand-made vessels of earthenware heated by red-hot flints, or,
as we may infer from the frequent occurrence in barrows of charred
bones, roasted or broiled over the fire; and the remains of each meal
were left to accumulate in the huts.[324] It has been suggested by
one of the most eminent of living anthropologists that the ornament,
so often observed on prehistoric earthenware, which was produced by
impressing a cord upon the clay while it was soft, may be traceable
to an earlier time when the art of the potter had not been evolved,
and vessels were made of plaited cords and also perhaps of skins and
hollowed wood.[325]
[Sidenote: Agriculture.]
Although agriculture was practised by the later neolithic inhabitants
of Denmark[326] and the lake-dwellers of Switzerland,[327] there is
very little evidence that their contemporaries in this country tilled
the soil. A few of the stone pestles which have been found belong, it
is true, to that period,[328] but it is impossible, except perhaps
in a very few instances, to affirm that they were used for grinding
corn;[329] and although, as we have seen, certain rough-hewn celts
may have been agricultural implements,[330] it is doubtful whether
they all belong to the Age of Stone. Cereals and textile flax-fabrics,
which are abundant in the lake-dwellings, are absolutely wanting in
every British neolithic deposit that has been explored.[331] Negative
evidence of this kind may not be worth much: nevertheless there is
reason to believe that agriculture was rare in Britain before the
introduction of bronze. Barrow-diggers have often noticed that the
teeth of neolithic skeletons are, as a rule, remarkably perfect; while
those of the skulls found in round barrows and unchambered cairns
are very much worn down; and it has been reasonably argued that the
difference was due to food. The people of the Bronze Age, who were
undoubtedly cultivators, subsisted in great part upon grain, which
was probably ill cooked, and must have been largely mixed with stony
grit from contact with the rude mullers by which it had been ground.
The neolithic people, on the other hand, lived mainly upon milk and
flesh-meat.[332] Pastoral tribes do not turn to agriculture until their
numbers have increased to such a degree that they have no prospect of
being able to live by hunting and on the produce of their flocks and
herds alone: they prefer an easy life; and agriculture, especially to
those whose implements are primitive, is difficult and laborious.[333]
If corn was grown, it was probably on the open chalk downs.[334] The
richer soils were covered with forest; and, although the stone axe was
a better tool than any which the primitive hunters had possessed, the
neolithic herdsman must have shrunk from the labour of cutting down the
trees and dragging them away. Fire would have been of no avail. Men
who have cleared forests in New Zealand will tell you that the fiercest
flames will not destroy standing trees: twigs and leaves burn like
tinder; but the trunk remains unconsumed.
[Sidenote: Treatment of women.]
There is evidence, though it is hardly needed, that the inevitable
hardships of life were not equally shared, and that the lot of the
women was worse than that of the men. Judging from the measurements of
the neolithic skeletons, the disparity between the sexes in stature
was as great as it is among modern savage tribes. The average height
of the men was about five feet six inches, of the women only four
feet ten inches: the difference in civilized communities is about
half as much.[335] It is perhaps safe to conclude that when food was
scarce, the men thought first of themselves, and that the women not
only suffered from the effects of early child-bearing,[336] but had
more than their [Sidenote: Duration of life.] share of toil. No doubt
disease, the attacks of wild beasts, and frequent accidents, as well as
intertribal wars, tended to shorten the duration of life: at all events
Thurnam calculated that the average age of the people whose skeletons
he had examined was not more than forty-five years.[337]
[Sidenote: Clothing and ornaments.]
The sheep and goats and the wild red deer which supplied the tribes
with food doubtless clothed them as well; and it may be questioned
whether in this respect they had advanced much beyond the primitive
denizens of caves. The lake-dwellers of Switzerland were expert
spinners: the textile fabrics which lay unnoticed for millenniums
in their settlements show what they could achieve.[338] Our own
forefathers may have been as skilful: but evidence is lacking; and
their pottery was so inferior to that of the Helvetians, they lagged
so far behind them as tool-makers, that we may reasonably assume that
their women also were less proficient in domestic arts.[339] The
perforated disks of stone and baked clay, called spindle-whorls, by
which the spindle was made to rotate, have indeed been found in great
numbers here; but not a single specimen can be assigned with confidence
to the Neolithic Age.[340] British ornaments too of that period are
very rare.[341] No doubt the Britons were as fond of display as other
barbarians: there is, as we have seen,[342] some evidence that they
decorated their bodies with red paint; but a few lignite beads, found
in the long horned cairn of Yarhouse,[343] and a single bead of shale,
found in a long barrow in Gloucestershire,[344] are all the personal
ornaments that we can unhesitatingly refer to the Age of Stone. An
ingenious archaeologist, who perhaps knows less of human nature than of
books and museums, has argued that the origin of jewellery was rooted
in superstition;[345] and those who know that natural holed stones
are still prized as amulets in the more primitive villages of this
country[346] may easily persuade themselves that savage men and women
had faith in the prophylactic properties of the perforated teeth and
beads which they hung round their necks: but nobody who can understand
the passion for sparkling gems which possesses many women and some men
will believe that the love of adornment for its own sake was not as
deep-seated in primitive human nature as superstition.[347]
[Sidenote: Trepanning.]
But amulets of a different kind, which are abundant in other lands,
appear to be almost entirely wanting in our own. It is not difficult
to understand that in material culture the prehistoric inhabitants
of Britain should have been outstripped by those of the Continent;
but it is remarkable that a practice, the motive of which was mainly
superstitious, and which was prevalent not only in every European
country but also in America, has in this island apparently left but
one vestige, which belonged to the Late Celtic Period. Sixty trepanned
skulls were found in the cavern of Baumes-Chaudes in the department
of Lozère; and twenty years ago a French physician had collected one
hundred and sixty-seven. The operation was evidently performed either
by scraping the skull with a stone implement or with a stone saw;[348]
for an eminent surgeon has remarked that saw-cuts are distinctly
visible on some of the French trepanned skulls. In a few cases the
object was to remove dead bone; but as most of the skulls show no trace
of disease, it has been conjectured that the patients were afflicted
with epilepsy, and that the operator’s aim was to relieve them by
permitting the escape of the demon who was believed to be the author of
their sufferings. It is, however, certain that the skull of a corpse
was sometimes trepanned; and the edge of the perforation in specimens
of this class generally shows signs of an old cicatrization. The
explanation may easily be found. Some of the fragments which had been
removed from trepanned skulls were evidently used as amulets, for they
are carefully rounded, polished, and perforated for suspension; and one
was actually found hanging from a Gallic torque, or gold collar, of
the Early Iron Age. Most probably, as the famous anthropologist, Paul
Broca, concluded, these amulets were taken posthumously from the skulls
of persons who had survived the operation, being regarded as potent
prophylactics.[349]
[Sidenote: The _couvade_.]
Folk-lore societies have collected countless instances of beliefs or
customs preserved by the lower classes of modern nations, many of
which are certainly of very remote origin, although it is generally
impossible to say where they originated, or whether they belonged to
this or that people of antiquity. But there is evidence that one custom
which appears utterly meaningless to those who have not inquired its
original meaning, which is retained by peoples who have long forgotten
what that meaning was, but which with others is still or was in
comparatively recent times not merely a survival but a reality, existed
among our neolithic ancestors. Every one has heard of the _couvade_,
or hatching, which ordains that when a child is born the father should
take to his bed, and there remain for days or weeks after the mother
has resumed her ordinary mode of life. We learn from Greek writers that
it prevailed among the ancient Corsicans,[350] the Tibareni of Pontus
in Asia Minor,[351] and the Iberians of Northern Spain;[352] and with
various modifications it exists or has existed among the Basques and
the Caribs of the West Indies, in South America, California, Greenland,
West Africa, Southern India, the Indian archipelago, and Eastern Asia.
It originated in a belief that the real parent was the father, and that
between him and his child there was a physical union so intimate that
unless he rested and were nursed and abstained from ordinary food, his
child would suffer. But this belief was not primitive. Matriarchy, it
would seem, was the root of family life: descent was reckoned through
the mother, for the father was often unknown. It has been conjectured
that when paternal relationship began to be acknowledged, fathers felt
the need of insisting upon their rights, and that accordingly a parody
of lying-in gradually became a custom.[353] An Irish legend shows that
the _couvade_ survived in Ulster into the Christian era;[354] and a
few years ago a similar custom was observed in a remote district of
Yorkshire.[355] Although the peoples who have retained the _couvade_ in
modern times, like those among whom its existence was noted by ancient
writers, are, with hardly an exception, neither of Aryan nor of Semitic
origin, it is perhaps conceivable that it may have been brought into
the British Isles in post-neolithic times by invaders who had accepted
it from races whom they had subdued; but it is far more probable that
it was a widespread custom of the Neolithic Age belonging to tribes of
the Mediterranean race, to which the neolithic Britons, as well as the
Iberians and Corsicans, belonged.[356]
[Sidenote: Hill-forts.]
Although the neolithic tribes of Britain had common customs and
superstitions,[357] and were, for the most part, sprung from one stock,
they were not of course a nation. Arriving in successive hordes,
and settling wherever they could find room, they were separated by
mountain, stream, forest, and morass, as well as by the lack of horses,
vehicles, and roads. But as their numbers multiplied and it became
more and more difficult to find sufficient food, the struggle for
life must have led to intertribal war, and men’s minds must have been
exercised to improve their weapons and to fortify their settlements
and cattle-pounds not only against the wolves, which they had ever
with them, but also against depredation. Every one who knows the
South Downs and the hilly districts of the midlands, the west, and the
north, has noticed the camps and earthworks which crown almost every
height; but, as we have already seen, there are only a few of these
entrenchments of which the period of construction is known, although
we have abundant evidence that many have been occupied by successive
races or in successive stages of culture. Almost all of them have
been superficially explored, and implements of neolithic form have
been found in many; but the reader knows that such implements were
used in the Bronze Age and in the Iron Age even in those parts of the
country where bronze and iron were common. If stone tools were found
in the original body of a rampart or beneath the silt in a trench,
without any objects of metal or any such tools or pottery as were
characteristic of the Bronze Age or of later times, it might fairly be
presumed that the people who built the camp were in their neolithic
stage.[358] Except the camps that are known to be Roman, and others
which have been proved by excavation to be Norman, most of those that
have been thoroughly explored were evidently constructed after the
art of metal-working had become known; and this is also true of those
that have been scientifically examined in France.[359] There are,
however, not a few British strongholds for which neolithic age has been
claimed, though perhaps in some instances on insufficient grounds.
Thus it has been asserted that Whit Tor camp on Dartmoor has yielded
ample evidence of neolithic origin;[360] but all the excavations of
hut-circles, kistvaens, and barrows that have been made on Dartmoor
tend to show that it was not occupied before the Bronze Age.[361] A few
of the pits which abound in the hill-fort of Eggardun in Dorsetshire
have been explored; and it is said that one of them contained ‘typical
neolithic pottery’.[362] But, in the absence of an exact description
of the vessels, such an argument is unsatisfactory, although it might
have some weight if they resembled the coarse unornamented bowls which
were found in the long barrow of North Bavant in Wiltshire[363] or the
neolithic bowls of the Scottish chambered cairns.[364] Still there are
entrenchments, such as Chanctonbury Rings,[365] on the downs some six
miles north of Worthing, Beltout,[366] within which stands the Beachy
Head lighthouse, the Maiden Bower camp near Dunstable,[367] and some
on the Surrey Hills,[368] in and around which flint implements have
been found in such profusion that they may be provisionally referred
to the Neolithic Age.[369] Even Cissbury camp, which contained
numerous relics of the Early Iron Age, may have been constructed in
the age of stone: a single cutting, only eleven yards long, revealed
numerous worked flints lying, without pottery or metal, on the chalk
bottom; and Pitt-Rivers suggested that the entrenchment might have been
made for the protection of the mines.[370] It is true that no bronze
implement was found, from which it might be argued that the camp was
not constructed before the Iron Age: but, for aught that we can tell,
bronze may still be lying beneath the soil; for the cost of excavating
the whole camp, without which it is impossible to prove the negative,
would be enormous. Certain small entrenchments in Franche-Comté were
unquestionably constructed in neolithic times;[371] and it may be
safely said that in an age when life and property were so insecure
every isolated settlement must have been in some way fortified. Many
of the entrenchments on the South Downs are, however, so slight that
they could only have protected flocks and herds against wolves; and
this may also have been the purpose of the thickset hedge, undoubtedly
of prehistoric origin, that marks the line along which the downs were
bounded by the Wealden Forest.[372]
[Sidenote: Primitive writing.]
Although the historian who endeavours to press archaeology into his
service is struck by the general similarity in material culture between
the peoples of different lands, and is sometimes inclined, overlooking
the differences in detail, to think that in describing one he would
be describing all, he presently remembers that if historical records
were to be destroyed, much the same state of things would confront
the archaeologist of the remote future; and in his own researches he
meets with differences which lead him to believe that in every land
the first beginnings of a national culture and of a national character
were already being evolved. In this country or in that significant
relics are discovered of which in others there is not a trace. One of
the more sensational discoveries of recent years may set us wondering
whether in prehistoric Britain vestiges of primitive writing will ever
come to light. Many people have heard vaguely of the painted pebbles
and the frescoes of Mas d’Azil and the other caverns in the Western
Pyrenees which the veteran archaeologist, Edouard Piette, has for many
years diligently searched. On one of the objects found in the cavern of
Lorthet--a spirited engraving on reindeer-horn representing reindeer
and salmon--are to be seen two small lozenges, each enclosing a central
line: ‘justly proud of his work,’ says Monsieur Piette, ‘the artist
has appended his signature.’[373] Be this as it may, other explorers
have exhumed from the Placard cave at Rochebertier and the caves of
La Madelaine and Mas d’Azil antlers incised with signs which exactly
resemble various Greek and Phoenician letters, and may be compared with
signs that have been found in an island of the Pacific. These signs are
not letters but symbols: they are not combined in such a way as to form
words or inscriptions.[374] But, says Monsieur Piette, being symbols,
they do constitute a kind of primitive writing.[375] True writing
is, however, evident on a potsherd taken from a neolithic settlement
at Los Murciélagos in Portugal.[376] If this fragment could itself be
proved to be of neolithic age, it would follow that in that remote time
the art of writing was already known to at least one branch of the
Mediterranean stock. But not a trace of writing, not even one of the
alphabetiform symbols which were so widespread in the Pyrenees even
in the late Palaeolithic Age, has yet been found in any prehistoric
deposit in this island.
[Sidenote: Sepulture: barrows and cairns.]
So far we have been trying to piece together an account of the life of
neolithic man. But it is of the last scene of all that the vestiges
which he has left behind are most unmistakable. His sepulchres have
been thoroughly and scientifically explored. Moreover, it is from
them that much of the knowledge which we possess of his daily life
has been gleaned. They afford evidence about his political and social
organization, his religion, and his customs; and when we have examined
them we shall be able to form a more vivid idea of the way in which he
lived.
We have seen that the dead were sometimes buried in caves wherein they
or their forefathers had dwelled;[377] and the humbler folk who had
not the means of erecting sepulchral monuments must have dug graves
of which no apparent trace remains; but the funerals that have told
their own tale were those of chieftains, their families, and perhaps
their favourite slaves, who were buried beneath mounds which, in divers
forms, are found all over the world.[378] Savage communities indeed
are commonly ruled by councils of elders; but in the period when the
neolithic barrows were being erected the Britons had certainly passed
beyond this stage. The means by which the revolution was effected were
probably various. If the most adroit magician in a community of which
every member practised magic may sometimes by force of character have
made himself a chief,[379] it is certain that when property accumulated
and group began to prey upon group, the instinct of self-preservation
must have led men to submit to the rule of him who was marked out as
the fittest to command in war.[380] Those who love to look for the
places in this land that are hallowed by their associations with an
older world may have seen the long barrows which are conspicuous on
the hills that command Salisbury Plain and on other western heights,
the chambered cairns of Scotland, and the dolmens of Cornwall and
Wales. These sepulchres are far rarer than those of the Bronze Age,
not more than sixty having been counted in Wiltshire, where they are
most numerous, while the round barrows of the same county number nearly
two thousand;[381] and the area of their distribution is far less
extensive. In Gloucestershire, Somersetshire, and Dorsetshire they are
not uncommon; a few are to be seen in the East Riding of Yorkshire;
and Kent, Berkshire, Oxfordshire, Durham, Cumberland, and Westmorland
have each one.[382] Chambered cairns which are related to chambered
long barrows are found near St. Asaph and in Caithness;[383] and other
chambered cairns and chambered round barrows, which belong to the
latest period of the Stone Age or to a time of transition, exist in
Orkney, Inverness-shire, Argyllshire and some of the adjoining islands,
the Holm of Papa Westray, Derbyshire, Wales, Cornwall and the Scilly
Isles, and the islands of the Channel.[384]
The materials of which these monuments are composed vary of course
according to the nature of the country in which they were erected.
Stone was used where it was abundant, and earth or rubble where
stone was not to be obtained. The significance of the barrows lies
not in their substance but in their form; but it is probable that
the absence of chambered barrows in South Wiltshire and Dorsetshire,
where unchambered ones are common, is due simply to lack of the
necessary stones.[385] The eminent Swedish archaeologist, Nilsson,
argued that the ‘passage-graves’, or chambered barrows, of Scandinavia
were designed on the model of subterranean dwellings; but the little
evidence that remains tends to show that no such analogy existed here;
and the Eskimos and Lapps, whose dwellings Nilsson had in view, bury
their dead in tombs of a different kind.[386] Antiquaries who have had
experience in opening chambered and unchambered barrows consider that
the two classes were erected in the same period;[387] and the nature of
the interments, as we shall presently see, justifies this conclusion.
The orientation of the long barrows and of the chambered cairns which
are classed with them seems to show that the builders intended that
the spirits of the dead might look upon the rising sun. The axis of
the barrow or cairn generally lies either due east and west or in a
direction approximating more or less closely thereto; and the broader
and higher end of the barrow, where, as a rule, the sepulchral deposits
are found,[388] generally faces eastward. In a few instances the axis
lies between the north and the south, the broad end pointing sometimes
northward, sometimes southward. When the direction is not due east, it
varies between north-north-east and south-east; and one may reasonably
conclude that this variation depended upon the place of sunrise at
the time of the year when the barrow was erected. Similar varieties,
combined with the same general tendency to point the barrow towards the
east, have been observed in the neolithic tombs of other countries.[389]
[Illustration: FIG. 16.]
Long barrows vary greatly, not only in their materials and orientation,
but also in their size and shape. Many of them exceed a hundred feet in
length; and the chambered barrow of West Kennet is three hundred and
thirty-five feet long and seventy-five broad at its eastern end.[390]
More striking, however, than the mere dimensions of a long barrow
is the disproportion between its whole extent and that part of it in
which alone the dead were laid. The immense toil which must have been
expended in constructing such a monument by labourers who had only
deer-horn picks and stone tools proves not only density of population,
effective organization, and the despotism which the chiefs must have
exercised, but also a religious awe the compelling force of which we,
who live in a world that has grown old, can hardly conceive. Some of
the mounds might in outline be compared to a very elongated egg, others
to one-half of a pear cut lengthwise and laid upon its flat side.[391]
The trenches from which the material was excavated extend along their
sides, but never encircle the ends.[392] The chambered barrows are of
many kinds, no two being exactly alike. Some have a central gallery,
entered by a doorway at the broad end, so low that it is necessary to
stoop or even to crawl. Generally the chambers, placed opposite one
another in one, two, three, or even six pairs, open out of the gallery
like the chapels in a Gothic cathedral; while occasionally, as at West
Kennet, the gallery leads to a terminal chamber; and in other instances
both lateral and terminal chambers are found. At Rodmarton and Nether
Swell in Gloucestershire there is no gallery; and the chambers open
externally. Galleries and chambers are alike built of stones set on
edge, which (the interstices being filled in with dry walling) support
flags laid horizontally across; though occasionally, as at Stoney
Littleton in Somersetshire, the roof is constructed of converging
layers of stones which form a rude arch.[393] Some so-called chambered
barrows, for instance Littleton Drew in Wiltshire, have no chambers,
but only cists, or shallow graves excavated in the soil and built up
with stone slabs. The mounds were generally faced with dry walling;
and on the chalk downs of North Wiltshire, where blocks of sandstone
abounded, the wall was often, as at West Kennet, surrounded by a
peristalith formed of stones erected at regular intervals. These stones
have disappeared; but drawings, made in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, show what they were like.[394] The architects were inspired
by a vivid sense of beauty. The enclosing wall, as it approached the
broad and high end of the barrow, was turned inwards by gradual and
graceful curves, which generally terminated in great stones that served
as the jambs of the entrance. Even when there was no gallery, this
symmetrical curve was still adopted, and its termination marked by
monumental pillars.[395] The Wor Barrow on Cranborne Chase, an oval
mound of such uncommon form that Pitt-Rivers, before he opened it,
felt doubtful whether it did not belong to the Bronze Age, appears to
have been a chambered sepulchre of an abnormal kind. When the tumulus
had been removed, a trench, enclosing an oblong space, appeared in the
chalk which had formed the old surface. Stake-holes were detected in
the trench; and the famous antiquary concluded that the stakes had been
simply ‘a wooden version of the long chambers of stone’.[396]
[Illustration: FIG. 17.]
Intimately related to certain chambered long barrows are the famous
horned cairns, which exist only in Caithness. Although their forms also
are various, the larger cairn of Yarhouse being extremely elongated
while that of Ormiegill might be almost exactly contained within
a perfect square, the ruling idea remained the same. The exterior
wall, which is always double, develops eastward and westward into
horn-shaped projections, which curve outwards. Thus the four sides
form four symmetrical concave curves; whereas in English chambered
barrows, like that of Uley and some of the barrows at Upper Swell in
Gloucestershire,[397] the curvilinear projections which correspond with
the horns exist only at the eastern end. An opening between the eastern
horns in the Scottish cairns gives access to the chamber, which is
commonly divided into three partitions by two pairs of stones, crossing
the side walls and leaving a passage between.[398]
Just as the long are earlier than the short horned cairns, so the
latter are earlier than the round chambered cairns of Scotland; for no
horned cairns were erected after the Scottish Bronze Age had begun,
whereas, although the round chambered cairns were developed towards the
close of the Neolithic Age, and although metal has never been found in
them,[399] their external form was reproduced in the Bronze Age, when
chambers were no longer built.[400] The chambers of the round cairns
also are divided into sections; and one of them, near Loch Etive in
Argyllshire, shows traces of an encircling trench and rampart.[401]
In Southern Britain the chronological sequence was probably the same:
the round chambered cairns seem to be later than the chambered long
barrows. The Park Cwm tumulus in the peninsula of Gower, which has
a central avenue and two pairs of opposite chambers opening out of
it,[402] has been likened to the Uley barrow; but its form is round.
The chambered tumulus of Plas Newydd Park in Anglesey, which is
roughly oval,[403] may possibly represent an earlier and transitional
form.[404]
Round chambered barrows exist in Derbyshire, the design of which is
purely local. Thus the Five-Wells barrow, near Taddington, has two
chambers, each of which was approached by a gallery entered through a
kind of port-hole on either side of the mound. The skulls that have
been found in these tombs are of the neolithic type: but a barrow on
Derwent Moor, which is commonly assigned to the same period,[405]
contained an urn, ornamented with designs characteristic of the Bronze
Age, in which a piece of copper was found;[406] and an experienced
antiquary has remarked that in cataloguing the remains found in the
Derbyshire barrows he ‘found it almost impossible to separate the
Neolithic from the Bronze Age interments’.[407] In West Cornwall
also there are gigantic chambered cairns, round or oval, the date of
which is uncertain. No bronze has been found in them, but abundance
of pottery, and cists which are undoubtedly later than the chambers.
One, standing on the cliff which rises above Cape Cornwall, contained
a double-walled dome, and reminded its explorer of the huge tope at
Bhojpur.[408]
Chambered cairns of a peculiar kind remain in Argyllshire and the
islands of Islay and Arran, the like of which have been discovered
nowhere else except on the opposite coast of Ireland.[409] Nearly
all the pottery that has been found in them closely resembles that
of the dolmens of North-Western France and the Pyrenees, while none
exactly like it has been exhumed in England; and, combining these
facts with the geographical position of the sepulchres themselves,
the antiquary who has explored them concludes that their builders
came late in the Neolithic Age from Brittany, and, sailing up St.
George’s Channel, settled on the opposite shores of Scotland and
Ireland.[410] Physically, however, they belonged, as their skeletons
show, to the same stock as the great majority of the neolithic people
of Britain.[411]
[Sidenote: Inhumation and incineration.]
Here, as also in France[412] and Northern Germany,[413] funerals
were performed both by inhumation and incineration. In the barrows
of South-Western Britain, cremation, although not unknown, was very
rare;[414] in Yorkshire[415] and the chambered cairns of Bute,[416]
almost universal. Judging from the analogy of other countries and from
the fact that inhumation persisted into the Bronze Age, and then for
a long period was generally superseded by cremation,[417] it seems
probable that the latter was not introduced until a comparatively late
epoch.[418] The two modes of burial were, however, contemporaneous
not only in different parts of the country but in the same district
and in the same grave. Burnt and unburnt bones have been found lying
together in such a manner as to prove that they had been interred at
the same time.[419] Cremation was generally performed in the chamber
or on the floor of the barrow where the body was deposited.[420] When
the corpse was buried entire, it was usually laid upon the ground[421]
with the knees doubled up towards the chin, or placed sitting in a
similar posture by the side of the tomb.[422] This custom, which was
almost universal in prehistoric times, and is still practised by many
savages, is best explained by the assumption that it was thought seemly
to bury the dead in the position in which they had slept, and that, for
the sake of warmth, they had commonly lain down to rest in an attitude
which most of us have occasionally adopted for the same reason.[423]
In some barrows only single skeletons have been found; but generally
in unchambered barrows, where more than two persons had been buried in
one grave, the bones lay heaped together as though the bodies had been
unceremoniously flung down;[424] while in certain cases they were found
disjointed in such wise that it was evident that the dead had not been
buried entire, or, as is often the case in savage countries and even
in Brittany and the Catholic cantons of Switzerland, until long after
the flesh had decayed.[425] The Balearic islanders, in the time of
Diodorus Siculus,[426] used to sever the bodies of their dead in pieces
and inter them in urns; and the same practice prevailed in Spain in the
Age of Bronze.[427] British explorers, moreover, have often noticed,
in opening barrows, that skeletons were incomplete, many of the bones
being absent.[428] Since the piled skeletons belonged to old and young,
male and female, it can only be concluded that corpses were often
stored, as in a mortuary, until a sufficient number had accumulated,
and then buried all together.[429] In a barrow situated at Upper Swell
in Gloucestershire, Rolleston found evidence which convinced him that
interments were sometimes made successively upon the same spot. An
undisturbed skeleton was here surrounded by a great quantity of bones,
the arrangement of which was such that he was forced to conclude that
they had been displaced in order to make room for it.[430] In chambered
barrows successive interments were of course regular, gallery and
chamber being designed to admit them.
[Sidenote: Human sacrifice.]
Thurnam was convinced that in the barrows which he explored there
were unmistakable evidences of human sacrifice. In nearly all of them
he found fractured skulls, the broken edges of which were so sharp
that he inferred that the skull had been cleft in life by a club or
a stone axe; while in some cases one skull only was unmutilated. His
conclusion was that the few entire skulls were those of chiefs or
their relatives, while the others belonged to slaves or captives who
had been sacrificed. In one instance, in which only two interments
were met with, the broken skull was that of a woman, while the bones
of the other corpse, which belonged to a man, had been imperfectly
burned. Thurnam argued that the burnt bones belonged to a chief, and
that the woman was his wife.[431] Rolleston, on the other hand, could
see no reason for believing that the broken skulls had been cleft
deliberately.[432] He pointed out that the fragments were so numerous
that if the persons to whom they belonged had been sacrificed, they
must have been slaughtered by a succession of wanton blows; that the
fractures were utterly different from those of skulls which are known
to have been broken by deliberate blows, and resemble those which have
been caused by the shifting of soil or the collapse of stones; and he
argues that from what we know of the sentiments of savage and barbarian
peoples it is in the last degree improbable that slaves or captives,
if they had been sacrificed, would have been allowed to repose side by
side with their lords. Nevertheless it is not safe to reject all the
evidence which Thurnam adduced. In a round barrow near Stonehenge Hoare
found a skull which appeared to have been cut in two as deftly as by a
surgical instrument;[433] and one may believe that what was done in the
Bronze Age was not unknown in the Age of Stone. When we remember that
evidences of human sacrifice have been detected in French neolithic
tombs,[434] and that the practice was universal in ancient times,[435]
we shall be safe in assuming that neolithic Britain was no exception
to the rule that after a chieftain’s obsequies his dependents were
immolated in order that their souls might be set free to minister to
his.[436]
[Sidenote: Traces (?) of cannibalism.]
But Thurnam also believed that the long barrows contained evidences
of cannibalism.[437] The numerous passages in which ancient writers
accused the inhabitants of the British Isles of devouring their own
kind refer mainly to the Irish:[438] but they were speaking of their
contemporaries; and when some of the Yorkshire barrows were opened it
was evident that the flesh had been removed from the bodies before
they were interred.[439] But even if cannibalism was practised in our
Neolithic Age, the motive was not hunger. The numerous bones of oxen,
swine, red deer, goats, and horses[440] which are found in the barrows,
mingled with fragments of pottery, prove that a funeral was an
occasion for a feast, and may show that, as in later times, offerings
were made to the ghosts of the dead.[441] If human flesh was eaten, it
was doubtless in the hope that moral qualities which had distinguished
the dead might be absorbed by the living.[442]
[Sidenote: Interment of animals.]
Perhaps the most curious feature in neolithic interments is that
animals were sometimes buried entire.[443] It is not indeed surprising
that at Eyford in Gloucestershire there was buried with a woman a dog
which may have been her companion;[444] but in a long barrow near
Stonehenge was found the skeleton of a goose which had evidently not
been eaten.[445] Was it a sign that neolithic people had the same
religious prejudice against eating geese which Caesar noted,[446] or
had this goose been sacrificed?[447]
[Sidenote: Religion.]
We can hardly err in regarding the sepulchral monuments on which such
stupendous labour was expended as witnesses of a belief which may
be called religious, and perhaps as a further illustration of the
apophthegm, ‘The first begetter of gods on earth was fear’.[448] For
if the spirits of ancestors are believed by savage tribes to be on the
whole well disposed towards those whom they leave behind, yet when
their bodies do not receive due burial their wrath is terrible.[449]
The most eminent of modern French archaeologists maintains that
the dolmens, chambered tombs, and standing stones of France were
erected under the influence of Druids;[450] and in this country also
the belief has long been growing that Druidism was of non-Celtic
and neolithic origin: but since our knowledge of it is confined
to the period when it was a Celtic institution, we must defer our
consideration of it.[451] But, apart from the graves themselves, there
is hardly any certain evidence in our neolithic interments of religious
belief. While in France, Scandinavia, Northern Germany, and other
lands, the tombs of this period were stored with implements, ornaments,
and weapons, the spirits of which were doubtless consecrated to the
service of the dead,[452] such relics are so rare in Britain[453] that
unless the barrows were despoiled in bygone days by heedless explorers,
we can only suppose that it was not generally thought necessary to
provide those who had passed away with the means of continuing their
life in another world; and it may be that the few arrow-heads, flakes,
and other objects which have been found in graves were rather intended
as marks of reverence or affection than for use.[454] On the other
hand, some of the implements found in neolithic barrows are said to
have been intentionally broken;[455] and this is often done by savages
in the belief that the souls of the implements[456] may thus be set
free to be of use to the spirits of the dead.[457] The holes that
are to be seen in the stones of dolmens in many lands are here so
rare[458] that we may hardly regard them as evidence of a belief that
spirits must be allowed an exit from their graves; although such a
belief has been common to many peoples, and may even linger on among
ourselves, as in France and Germany, in the superstition which often
impels survivors to open door or window when life is ebbing away[459].
It must be confessed that we know little more of neolithic than of
palaeolithic religion. Fetichism, which is ubiquitous--the belief that
spirits inhabit or operate through stocks and stones and what not;
the belief by which the Dorsetshire peasant who treasures his holed
pebble for luck is still animated--may be assumed to have belonged
to both.[460] The worship of saints may be a survival of the worship
of ancestors.[461] The traces of the adoration of wells and lakes
and rivers which may still be observed in the remoter parts of Great
Britain and Ireland, where peasants offer pence to the spirit of the
spring, and children were lately bidden to beware of the river-sprite
who was waiting to drown them, are undoubtedly linked to a prehistoric
faith;[462] and so is that superstition which prevails in New Zealand,
in the Malay Archipelago, and on the banks of the Ganges, and which
among the islanders of St. Kilda and the Shetlanders of Scott’s day
impelled men to refuse aid to a drowning comrade because they feared
to balk the marine demon of his prey.[463] Nor need we doubt that,
like other savages, our neolithic forefathers saw sun, moon, and stars
as living beings, or that, like the Australian aboriginals and the
nameless tribes who passed on to the Greeks the myths which were by
them invested with poetic form, they invented stories to account for
the wonders which they saw in the starry heavens.[464] Neither need we
hesitate to believe that, as each clan had its chief, so the clansmen
saw, above elves and kelpies, gnomes and goblins, rock-spirits and
tree-spirits, the mightier deities of Heaven and Earth, Sun and Moon,
Fire, Water, and Thunder.[465] We may believe, if we please, that they
prayed, as savages, nay Christians, often pray, not that they might
become better, but that they might be better off.[466] We may suppose
too that magic, which is even now used in remote villages as an engine
of extortion,[467] was still a power by which men strove to ensure
supplies of food or to make rain fall in time of drought, perhaps
also a weapon by which the man of intellect made himself obeyed. But
when we consider the infinite variety of forms which superstition
assumes, we see that it would be vain to contend that any one belief
now held by this or that savage tribe was identically part of the
faith that was professed in Britain in the Neolithic Age. Even the
fancy that an ethereal soul survived bodily death may not have been
universal; and as the Tonga islanders and the Virginians are said to
have believed that only the souls of chiefs would live again,[468] so
it is conceivable that the slaves by whose sweat were built the barrows
in which their lords were to be interred were regarded as doomed to
annihilation. And when we are told that some quaint superstition which
the folklorist discovers in Devonshire or the Highlands is non-Aryan,
and must therefore be traceable to the people who were here before
the first Celtic invader arrived, we may ask how it is possible to
disprove that it had been inherited by the Celt from remote ancestors
or had been borrowed by him from non-Aryan tribes while he was still
a wanderer. We must be content, if we can but catch something of the
spirit of neolithic religion, to remain in blank ignorance of its
details. We must keep in mind that in unnumbered centuries it cannot
have remained the same, and that in diverse regions its manifestations
must have been various. We must not ask for more than the assurance
that to the herdsmen who pastured their cattle on our downs all
Nature was animated; that in their eyes ‘as the human body was held
to live and act by virtue of its own inhabiting spirit-soul, so the
operations of the world seemed to be carried on by the influence of
other spirits’;[469] and that, like all savage and half-savage peoples,
they were enslaved by custom, fettered by taboos, and compelled,
when they were driven by necessity to violate them, to expiate their
offence by complex rites.[470] It may, however, be presumed that the
religion of neolithic man progressed when he ceased to be a wanderer,
and especially when he began to till the soil. Supernatural beings were
not of necessity gods to be worshipped; but when the god of a community
became the lord of its land, he was its protector, nay, its father,
who, in return for due reverence and sacrifice, would do his utmost to
guard it against human enemies and hostile deities.[471]
And perhaps, since primitive worship concerned the community rather
than the individual,[472] common superstitions and participation in
sacrificial feasts were already beginning to do their work of creating
the sense of kindred between divers groups, out of which, ages later
and after successive new invasions, war and policy were to develop a
state.[473]
We have gathered some scraps of information from the tools and weapons
and pottery, the dwellings and mines, the graves and the skeletons
of neolithic man. Can these dry bones live? Only for him who has
imagination, which, as the historian whose own was supported by a vast
armoury of solid knowledge declared with splendid paradox, ‘is the
mother of all history as of all poetry.’[474] It is not when we are
reading the memoirs in which discoveries are recorded, not when we are
wandering through the galleries of a museum, that those happy moments
come in which we discern the faint outlines of the prehistoric world,
but rather when we are roaming over sand or moor or upland, looking
for the tools that those old workers wrought, in the midst of the
monuments which their hands upreared. Not the outward life alone comes
back to us--the miner with lamp and pick creeping down the shaft; the
cutler toiling amid a waste of flints; herdsmen following cattle on
the downs; girls milking at sundown; lithe swarthy hunters returning
from the chase; fowlers in their canoes gliding over the meres; serfs
hauling blocks up the hillside to build the chambers in yonder barrow;
the funeral feast; the weird sepulchral rites; the bloody strife for
the means of subsistence between clan and clan:--we think also of the
meditations of the architects who created those monuments in memory of
the dead and of the adventurous lives of those who were thus honoured;
of their survivors’ desperate denial of death’s finality; of the
immeasurably slow, age-long movement of expanding civilization; of the
influence of superstition, paralysing, yet ever tending to consolidate
society; of the enthusiast whose thoughts soared above the common
level; of the toil that spent itself in millenniums past, but is still
yielding fruit; of unrecorded deeds of heroism and of shame; of man’s
ambition and of woman’s love.
[Sidenote: An alien invasion: period of transition.]
Before the Neolithic Age came to its end invaders began to appear who
had not yet learned the art of metal-working, but who belonged to a
race of which the people in possession knew nothing.[475] Sepulchral
customs began to change. Long barrows were erected still, but, as in
France, Holland, and other lands,[476] mounds of circular form were
rising, and at last supplanted them. It was a time of transition; and
although in the far west and the far north the Stone Age lingered on,
another was approaching, which had long since dawned in more favoured
lands,--the Age of Bronze.