behalf of a degraded race of beings whose helpless lot had been preceded
by the Hesiodic Golden, Silver, and Bronze ages, as well as by an Heroic
age of such demigods as the Titan son of Iapetus. By a reverse process
of evolution from the lower to higher stages, the anthropoid, or Caliban
of archæological science, becomes the tool-maker, the tool-user, and in
the same primitive stage, the fire-maker. But the service of fire is
required by man under the most varied conditions of life. The stone lamp
with its moss wick, and the stone kettle, are important implements in
the snow-hut of the Eskimo. On those he depends, not only for cooking,
but for his supply of water from melted snow; and without the lighted
taper of his stone lamp the indoor life of the long, unbroken Arctic
night would be passed in a rayless dungeon. He has inherited the
knowledge of the palæolithic fire-maker, from whom, indeed, some have
claimed for him direct genealogical descent; and he generally treasures
among his most useful appliances a piece of quartz, and a nodule of
pyrites, which constitute his flint and steel. At the remote extreme of
the southern continent the same precious bequest is in use by the
Fuegians and Patagonians of Tierra del Fuego, the name of which is a
memorial of its fire-using savages. The Fuegian makes a hearth of clay
in the bottom of his rudely constructed bark canoe, on which he
habitually keeps a fire burning. He prepares a tinder of dried moss or
fungus, which is readily ignited by the spark struck from a flinty stone
by means of a pyrites. The invaluable discovery is shared by the lowest
races. The Australian, the Andaman Islander, and other rudest tribes of
the Old and the New World, have mastered the same great secret, and turn
it to useful account.
The tradition may have been perpetuated from generation to generation
from the remotest dawn of human reason, or it may have been rediscovered
independently among diverse races. But wherever the value of the pyrites
in evoking the latent spark of the flint was known, it would be a
coveted prize and a valuable object of barter. The story of the old
fire-makers is recorded still in the charcoal ashes of many an ancient
hearth; for charcoal is one of the most indestructible of substances
when buried. In the famous Kent’s Hole limestone cavern at Torbay,
Devonshire, explorers have systematically pursued research backward from
the specifically dated stalagmitic record of “Robert Hodges, of Ireland,
Feb. 20, 1688,” through Saxon, Roman, British, and Neolithic strata, to
the deposit where human remains lay embedded alongside of those of the
woolly rhinoceros, the mammoth, the fossil horse, the hyæna and
cave-bear. There also lay, not only the finished implements, but the
flakes and flint cores that revealed the workshop of the primitive
tool-maker, and the charcoal that preserved the traces of his ancient
fire. So, too, in the Cromagnon rock-shelter of the Perigord, in an
upper valley of the Garonne, repeated layers of charcoal, interspersed
with broken bones and other culinary remains of the ancient
cave-dwellers, tell of the knowledge and use of fire in western Europe’s
Reindeer and Mammoth ages by palæolithic man. Compared with such
disclosures of primeval arts, the discoveries on which the Danish
archæologists based their systematising of prehistoric remains belong,
geologically speaking, to modern eras. Denmark is underlaid essentially
by Upper Cretaceous rocks, the _Etage Danien_ of most French writers,
and the _Faxoe Kelke_ of German geologists. Drift clays and gravels
overlie the cretaceous rocks in many places, with more recent deposits
of sands, gravels, etc. These latter are of Neolithic age, containing
bones only of existing mammals. Palæolithic deposits, with bones of
extinct species, do not appear to have been recognised in Denmark; nor
is there any trace of the presence of palæolithic man. Hence the field
alike of Danish antiquarian research and of archæological speculation
was greatly circumscribed. But thus precluded from the study of
primitive arts in that vague palæolithic dawn which lies outside of the
speculations of the historian, and beyond resort to classical
authorities for evidence in the interpretation of local disclosures, the
Danish antiquary escaped the temptation to many misleading assumptions
which long perplexed the archæologists of France and England; and so his
limited range has tended to facilitate the investigations into
subsequent disclosures relative to an ampler antiquity of man and his
arts.
Within the old Roman provinces of Western Europe, the Latin conquerors
were not only accredited with whatever showed any trace of Hellenic or
Roman art, but with the sole skill in working in iron. The Dane and
Northman were assumed to have followed in their wake with bronze, as
with runes and other essentially non-classical products; though still
the beautiful leaf-shaped sword and other choicest relics of the Bronze
age were not infrequently ascribed to the Romans. But philologists had
not yet assigned a place to the Celtic in the Aryan family of languages.
The Celt was not only assumed to be the barbarous precursor, alike of
Roman and Dane, but to be the primeval man of Western Europe. Hence when
the first hoards of palæolithic flint implements were accidentally
discovered in Sussex and Kent, their Celtic or British origin was
assumed without question. But the known historic position of the
Northman on Scandinavian soil prevented the crude application of the
term “Danish” to every bronze relic found there; and as no Roman
conqueror had trodden the soil of Denmark, the ethnology as well as the
archæology of the region was left unaffected by misleading complexities
that resulted from the presence of the Romans in Gaul and Britain. The
absence of remains of palæolithic man still further simplified the
problem; while the geology of the Danish peninsula favoured the
neolithic tool-maker. Flint abounds there in amorphous nodules or
blocks, and the nuclei, or cores, from which a succession of flakes have
been struck, are of frequent occurrence among the relics of the Danish
Stone age. Flint is no less abundant throughout the regions of France
and England on either side of the English Channel; and there,
accordingly, alike in the caves and the river-drift, the rude, massive
flint implements of the Palæolithic era abound.
The natural cleavage of flint, as also of the obsidian found in volcanic
localities in the Old and New World, so readily adapts both materials to
the manufacture of knives, lances, and arrow heads, that they appear to
have been turned to account by the tool-maker from the dawn of rudest
art. But it must not be overlooked that obsidian is limited to volcanic
regions, and flint is no more universally available than bronze or iron.
In some countries it is rare; in still more it is entirely wanting; and
yet its peculiar aptitude for tool-making appears to have been
recognised at the earliest period; so that implements and weapons of
flint, alike of the Palæolithic and the Neolithic age, abound in many
localities where the raw material of the tool-maker is unknown.
It was only natural that the systematic study and classification of the
manufactures of the ancient workers in flint should be first carried out
in regions such as the Danish peninsula, geologically related to the
Cretaceous period, and abounding in the material which most readily
adapts itself to the requirements of an implement-maker ignorant of the
arts of metallurgy. But the same inexhaustible store of raw material was
available to the “Flint-folk,” whose implements have become so familiar
by reason of more recent disclosures, of France and England, belonging
to a period when the climate, the physical geography, and the whole
animal life of Western Europe, contrasted in every respect with anything
we have knowledge of in remotest historic times. Those rude examples of
primitive art lie alongside of the unwrought flint in such profusion
that the examples of them already accumulated in the museums of Europe
and America amount to many thousands. But now that attention has been
thus widely drawn to their character and significance, it is found that
implements of the same class not only abound in regions geologically
favourable to their production, but they occur in nearly every country
in Europe, and on widely scattered localities in Asia and Africa, where
no such natural resources were available for their manufacture.
The earliest known type of primitive flint implements, illustrative of a
class now very familiar to archæologists, was accidentally recovered
from the quaternary gravel beds of the Thames valley, in the heart of
Old London, before the close of the seventeenth century. It is a
well-made spear-pointed implement, with an unusually tapering point,
while the butt-end is broad and roughly fashioned, so that it could be
used in the hand without any haft as a spade or hoe. The deposit in
which it lay would now be accepted as unquestionable evidence of its
Palæocosmic age; but at the date of its discovery, the Celtic era was
regarded as that to which all oldest traces of European man pertained.
This interesting relic is accordingly described in the Sloane Catalogue
of the British Museum as “a British weapon, found with elephant’s tooth,
opposite to Black Mary’s, near Gray’s Inn Lane.” In 1797, another and
highly interesting discovery of the same class was communicated to the
Society of Antiquaries of London by one of its members, Mr. John
Frere.[15] In this case a large number of palæoliths were found lying at
a depth of twelve feet from the surface, in a gravelly soil containing
fresh-water shells and bones of great size. Subsequent excavations in
the same locality, at Hoxne, Suffolk, confirm the presence there of the
bones of the mammoth, as well as of the fossil horse and the deer. Mr.
Frere was so strongly impressed with the evidence of antiquity that he
inclined to assign the implements to a remote age, “even beyond that of
the present world.” By this, however, he probably meant no more than M.
Boucher de Perthes, when, so recently as 1847, he entitled his volume
devoted to the corresponding discoveries in the valley of the Somme,
_Antiquités Celtiques et Antédiluviennes_. The antiquity of man, as now
understood, was then unthought of; and the word “antediluvian” sufficed
as a vague expression of remote indefinite antiquity for which
pre-Celtic would then have been accepted as an equivalent. Mr. Frere
speaks of the flint implements as “evidently weapons of war fabricated
and used by a people who had not the use of metals.” He further adds:
“The manner in which they lie would lead to the persuasion that it was a
place of their manufacture, and not of their accidental deposit; and the
numbers of them were so great that the man who carried on the brick-work
told me that before he was aware of their being objects of curiosity he
had emptied baskets full of them into the ruts of the adjoining
road.”[16]
When, in December 1886, Mr. J. Allan Brown communicated to the same
Society an analogous discovery near Ealing, Middlesex, English
archæologists had become so familiar with the idea of the antiquity of
palæolithic man, and the arts of his epoch, that the existence of
pre-Celtic races in Britain was accepted as a mere truism. It was not,
therefore, any matter of surprise to be told of the discovery of a
palæolithic workshop floor of the Drift period, near Ealing. It lay
about a hundred feet above the present bed of the Thames; and here, six
feet below the surface, on an ancient sloping bank of the river, an area
of about forty feet square disclosed nearly six hundred unabraded worked
flints, including neatly finished spear heads from five to six inches in
length. Alongside of these lay roughly wrought axes, chipped on one or
both sides to a cutting edge, and some of them unfinished. There were
also flint flakes, some with serrated edges, and well-finished knives,
borers, drills, chisels, etc. Waste flakes and chippings, as well as
cores, or partially worked blocks of flint, were also observed in
sufficient numbers to leave no doubt that here, in the place of their
manufacture, lay buried beneath the accumulations of unnumbered
centuries industrial products of the skilled artizans of the British
Islands contemporary with the long-extinct quaternary fauna.[17]
The types of flint implements, found at Hoxne in 1797, correspond to
other palæoliths recovered from rolled gravel and clay of the glacial
drift in the valleys of the Thames, the Somme, and the Seine. In their
massive and artless rudeness they seem to realise for us some fit ideal
of the primitive fabricator in his first efforts at tool-making. But the
Ealing find accords with the more extended discoveries of this class. In
reality, the manufactures of palæolithic man, as a whole, are less
artless than many examples of modern Indian flint-work. Not a few of the
stone axes have had their shape determined by that of the water-worn
stones out of which they were fashioned, and so required much less skill
than was necessarily expended in chipping the flint nodule into the
rudest of pointed implements. Any close-grained rock, admitting of
grinding and polish, was available for fashioning the larger weapons and
domestic implements, alike among the men of the Neolithic age and the
native races of the American continent in modern centuries. For many of
the simpler requirements of the tool-user, any apt stone chip or
water-worn pebble sufficed; and scarcely anything can be conceived of
more rude or artless than some of the stone weapons and implements in
use among savage tribes at the present day. Professor Joseph Leidy
describes a scraper employed by the Shoshone Indians in dressing
buffalo-skins, consisting of a thin segment of quartzite, so devoid of
manipulative skill that, he says, had he noticed it among the strata of
indurated clays and sandstone, instead of seeing it in actual use, he
would have regarded it as an accidental spawl.[18] Dr. Charles C.
Abbott, in his _Primitive Industry of the Native Races_, furnishes
illustrations of pointed flakes, or arrow tips, triangular arrow heads,
spear heads, and other stone implements, only a little less rude and
shapeless.[19] Of a similar character is the blade of a war-club in use
among the Indians of the Rio Frio, in Texas.[20] Nothing so rude has
been ascribed to artificial origin among the disclosures of the drift,
though corresponding implements may have escaped notice; for were it not
that the chipped piece of trachyte of the Texas war-club is inserted in
a wooden haft of unmistakable human workmanship, the blade would
scarcely suggest the idea of artificial origin. Mere rudeness,
therefore, is no certain evidence of the first artless efforts of man to
furnish himself with tools.
Until we arrive at the period of neolithic art, with its perforated
hammers, grooved axes, net-sinkers, gouges, adzes, and numerous other
ground and polished implements, fashioned of granite, diorite, trap, and
other igneous rocks, the forms of implements are few and simple,
dependent to a large extent on the natural cleavage of the flint. The
commoner examples of neolithic art, recovered in thousands from ancient
Scandinavian, Gaulish, and British graves, from the lake-dwellings of
Switzerland, the Danish and British shell mounds, the peat mosses of
Denmark and Ireland, and from numerous other depositories of prehistoric
industrial art, are scarcely distinguishable from the flint knives,
scrapers, spears, and arrow heads, or the chisels and axes, manufactured
by the American Indians at the present day. The material available in
certain localities, such as the claystone of the Haida and Babeen
Indians, and the argillite of the old implement-makers of New Jersey,
the obsidian of Mexico, or the quartz, jasper, and greenstone of many
Canadian centres, give a specific character to the implements of the
various regions; but, on the whole, the arts of the Stone period of the
most diverse races and eras present striking analogies, scarcely less
suggestive of the operation of a tool-making instinct than the work of
the nest-builders, or the ingenious art of the beaver. But the massive
and extremely rude implements of the river-drift and caves present
essentially different types, controlled indeed, like the productions of
later artificers, by the natural cleavage and other essential properties
of the material in which the flint-worker wrought, but with some
characteristic differences, suggestive of habits and conditions of life
in which the artificer of the Mammoth or Reindeer period differed from
the tool-maker of Europe’s Neolithic age, or the Indian savage of modern
centuries.
The tool-bearing drift-gravel of France and England presents its relics
of primitive art intermingled with countless amorphous unwrought flints.
Both have been subjected to the violent action of floods, to which the
present condition of such geological deposits is due; and many contents
of the caves, though subjected to less violence, are the results of
similar causes. But, along with numerous implements of the rude drift
type, the sheltered recesses of the caves have preserved, not only the
smaller and more delicate flint implements, but carefully wrought tools
and weapons of bone, horn, and ivory. Some, at least, of those
undoubtedly belong to the Palæolithic age, and therefore tend to verify
conclusions, not only as to the mechanical ingenuity, but also as to the
intellectual capacity of the earliest tool-makers. The large almond and
tongue-shaped flint implements are so massive as to have effectually
resisted the violence to which they, along with other contents of the
rolled gravels in which they occur, were subjected; whereas it is only
in the favouring shelter of the caves, or in rare primitive sepulchral
deposits, that delicate trimmed flakes and the more perishable
implements of bone and ivory, or horn, have escaped destruction.
The palæolithic implements to which Boucher de Perthes directed
attention so early as 1840, were recovered from drift-gravel beds, where
amorphous flint nodules, both whole and fractured, abound in countless
numbers; and this tended to suggest very reasonable doubts as to the
artificial origin of the rude implements lying in close proximity to
them. Nor was this incredulity lessened by the significance assigned by
him to other contents of the same drift-gravel. For so far was Boucher
de Perthes from overlooking the endless variety of fractured pieces of
flint recoverable from the drift beds, that his narrative is
supplemented by a series of plates of _L’Industrie Primitive_, the
larger number of which present chipped flints so obviously the mere
products of accidental fracture or of weathering, that they contributed
in no slight degree to discredit the book on its first appearance.
Others of them, however, show true flakes, scrapers, and fragments
probably referable to smaller implements of the same class, such as
would be recognised without hesitation as of artificial origin if found
alongside of undoubted flint implements in a cave deposit, or in any
barrow, cist, or sepulchral urn. In so far as they belong to the true
Drift, and not to the Neolithic or the Gallo-Roman period, they tend to
confirm the idea that the large almond and tongue-shaped implements are
not the sole relics of palæolithic art.
But now that adequate attention has been given to the stone implements
of the Drift-folk, or the men of the Mammoth and Reindeer ages, it
becomes apparent that they are by no means limited to such localities.
On the contrary, sites of native manufactories of flint implements, with
abundant remains of the fractured debris of the ancient tool-makers’
workshop, some of which are described on a later page, have been
discovered remote from any locality where the raw material could be
procured. Until the gun flint was superseded by the percussion cap, the
material for its manufacture was procured by sinking shafts through the
chalk until the beds of flint suited for the purpose were reached. In
this the modern flint-worker only repeated the practice of the primitive
tool-maker. A group of ancient flint pits at Cissbury, near Worthing,
has been brought into prominent notice by the systematic explorations of
Colonel A. Lane Fox. They occur in and around one of the aboriginal
hill-forts of Sussex, the name of which has been connected with Cissa,
the son of Ella, who is referred to by Camden as “Saxon king of those
parts.” But any occupation of the old hill-fort as a Saxon stronghold
belongs to very recent times when compared with that of the
flint-workers, whose pits have attracted the notice of modern explorers.
Colonel Lane Fox describes Cissbury Hill Fort as a great flint arsenal.
Here within its earthen ramparts the workmen who fashioned the arms of
the Stone age excavated for the beds of native flint in the underlying
chalk, and industriously worked it into every variety of weapon. “In one
place a collection of large flakes might be seen, where evidently the
first rough outline of a flint implement had been formed. In another
place a quantity of small flakes showed where a celt had been brought to
perfection by minute and careful chipping.”[21] In other excavations the
pounders, or stone hammers, were found, with a smooth rounded end by
which they were held in the hand, and the other bruised and fractured in
the manufacture of the flint implements that abound on the same
site.[22] Twenty-five pits were explored; and from these hundreds of
worked flints were recovered in every stage of workmanship: chips,
flakes, cores, balls, and finished knives; drills, scrapers, spear
heads, and axes or celts. In fact, Colonel Lane Fox sums up his general
statement of details with the remark that “Cissbury has produced
specimens of nearly every type known to have been found among flint
implements, from the Drift and Cave up to the Surface period.”[23] But
this “Woolwich” of the flint age occupied an altogether exceptional
position, with the raw material immediately underlying the military
enclosure, not improbably constructed on purpose to defend the primitive
arsenal and workshop, and so render its garrison independent of all
foreign supplies.
Other flint pits point to the labours of the industrious miner, and the
probable transport of the raw material to distant localities where the
prized flint could only be procured from traders, who bartered it for
other needful supplies. An interesting group of flint pits of this
latter class has been subjected to careful exploration by the Rev. Canon
Greenwell, with the ingenious inference already noted, of the traces of
a left-handed workman among the flint-miners of the Neolithic age. This
was based on the relative position and markings of two picks fashioned
from the antlers of the red deer, corresponding to others of the ancient
miners’ tools found scattered through the long-deserted shafts and
galleries of the flint pits.