Part 19

But, as a general rule, races engaged exclusively in hunting, who rarely turn their attention to the ground except to examine a trail or to search for water, would have little opportunity of profiting by the mineral wealth of the soil over which they roamed. Witness the Australians, who have continued for ages in ignorance of the gold and other mines which are now so attractive to Europeans; or the North and South American Indians, and the Esquimaux, amongst whom the art of smelting metal has never been found associated with those races who are in a purely hunting stage of existence; the wrought metals used by such races to point their weapons being invariably derived from civilized sources.

From hunting wild animals, the savage, in the natural sequence of progress, would turn his attention to their capture and domestication, and thus he creeps gradually into the pastoral life; and as the bones of animals under domestication, through want of exercise and good living, become smoother and of finer texture, the experienced anatomist is thereby afforded the means of distinguishing, amongst the vestiges of antiquity, the remains of domesticated animals from those derived from the chase, and of observing to what extent the domestication of animals was contemporaneous with other changes in the social condition of the people.[188] Still, however, in the pastoral state, the barbarian is not necessarily brought in contact with metals; and hence we should expect in many cases to find the traces of domesticated animals associated with people who are still in the stone age. This was notably the case amongst the ancient inhabitants of the Swiss lakes, where the sheep and horse have been found at Moosseedorf, and other lake habitations which are proved to belong to the stone age, though not in such abundance as in the settlements belonging to the bronze age.[189]

From the pastoral life, the barbarian, hampered by his flocks and herds, and no longer obliged to wander in search of food, settles down to a more stationary life, and by degrees takes to agriculture. Then, for the first time, he digs into the soil, and becomes acquainted with its mineral treasures. It has been proved by the discovery of quantities of carbonized grains of wheat, lumped together, in the Swiss lake-habitations of the stone age, together with the materials for preparing it for food, that a knowledge of agriculture preceded the general employment of bronze in that region,[190] whilst in Britain, and in Denmark also, bronze is almost invariably associated with evidence of domestication and agriculture.

The metals first employed would be those that are most attractive. Copper, in Europe, from the bright colour of its ores, would be noticed more readily than iron, which is often scarcely distinguishable from the soil, and requires greater temperature and more skilled labour to render it available than could be expected of a people emerging out of the savage state. It is not, therefore, surprising that in Europe, copper first, and subsequently its alloy, bronze, should have been employed before iron as a material for weapons. But in those countries where iron is found upon the surface in an attractive form, and in a condition to be easily wrought, we must for the same reason suppose that it would be used instead of copper in the earliest ages of metallurgy.

It is natural to suppose that, in the ordinary course of development, an age of pure copper must have intervened between the ages of stone and bronze. But implements of pure copper are comparatively rare, bronze being the metal almost invariably found following immediately upon the age of stone.[191] Notwithstanding the comparative rarity of copper tools, however, there is reason to believe that this metal was used in a pure state before the discovery of the alloy. According to Professor Max Müller, copper was the metal spoken of by Hesiod and Homer as the material generally employed for weapons in their time.[192] Mr. Rawlinson, in his _Five Ancient Monarchies_, says that the metallurgy of the early Chaldeans was of a very rude character, indicating a nation but just emerging from an almost barbaric simplicity, and that copper often occurs pure.[193] Copper implements, of a very early form, beaten into shape, occur not unfrequently in Ireland, as may be seen by specimens represented in Class A, Plate XVIII. They have also been found in Mecklenburg and in Denmark, and Klemm[194] says that they occur in Greece, Italy, Spain, Egypt, and Hindustan. At Maurach, in Switzerland, a copper celt was found in a lake dwelling, which Dr. Keller, notwithstanding this circumstance, attributes to the stone age.[195] In the lake dwelling of Peschiera, on the lake of Garda, several copper implements were discovered,[196] and in certain localities in Hungary copper implements are said to be as plentiful as those of bronze.[197] An axe of pure copper was discovered in Ratho Bog, near Edinburgh, under 20 feet of stratified sand and clay, and Dr. Wilson mentions that others have been found in Scotland.[198] Copper implements occur in Peru, to prove that, in the central parts of America also, the manufacture of bronze was preceded by the use of copper in a pure state; and in the ancient mines of Lake Superior we have distinct evidence of a stage of early metallurgy in which copper was used simply as a malleable stone, and beaten out into the form of implements without the aid of any alloy or a knowledge of the process of casting.[199] (See Plate XIX, figures 3, 4, 5, and 6.) When it is considered that without the admixture of a small portion of alloy of zinc or tin, copper is very difficult to melt, and can only be used by a laborious process of beating into form, and also what a great superiority bronze has over copper as a cutting material, whilst at the same time the process of fabrication is actually in some degree facilitated by the addition of tin, it is not surprising that on the first discovery of the advantages of this mixture, all the old implements of copper, wherever procurable, should have been taken to the melting-pot for conversion into bronze, and we should thus be left with such scanty evidence of the existence of an age of copper.

Up to this point we meet with no difficulty in supposing that the use of metal may have been at first adopted by many nations independently, without intercourse one with another. But when we find in both hemispheres of the globe a very wide diffusion of weapons of bronze, consisting of a mixture of the same metals, which, though varying slightly in its proportions, as we shall afterwards see, is nevertheless, for the most part, constant in its adherence to a standard of about nine parts copper to one of tin in all parts of the world, the question arises whether the knowledge of this mixed metal could have been arrived at independently in different countries, or whether it must have been diffused all over the universe from a common source. It is true that copper and tin materials are sometimes found in the same locality, as, for instance, in Cornwall, the locality which, from the remotest time up to the present, has afforded the most plentiful supply of both metals perhaps in the world. We have evidence, also, that in ancient copper mines fire was employed by the miners for softening the metal and detaching it from the matrix,[200] and it is, therefore, highly probable that the admixture of the two metals occurring so close together, and a knowledge of the advantages accruing therefrom, may have been brought about accidentally in the process of mining.[201] But this connexion of the metals in a state of nature is not common, and in those countries, such as Denmark and Scandinavia, where bronze implements occur, and in which neither metal is found native, it is most improbable that the inhabitants should have discovered the merits of these particular ingredients, unless they had derived the knowledge of them from without.

Hence we find archaeologists as much divided in their opinions upon what I may call the monogenesis or polygenesis of bronze, as biologists and anatomists are upon the monogenesis or polygenesis of the human race. The same question repeats itself again and again in dealing with the vestiges of the early history of man, and we may therefore divide the consideration of this question of the origin of bronze under pretty nearly the same heads to which I have adverted when speaking of the distribution of races, and of the age of stone (pp. 147-54). The questions to be considered may be numbered as follows:--(1) that bronze was spread from a common centre by an intruding and conquering race, or by the migration of tribes; (2) that the inhabitants of each separate region in which bronze is known to have been used discovered the art independently, and made their implements of it; (3) that the art was discovered, and the implements fabricated, on one spot, and the implements disseminated from that place by means of commerce; (4) that the art of making bronze was diffused from a common centre, but that the implements were constructed in the countries in which they are found.

Amongst the advocates for the first hypothesis, viz. introduction by the intrusion of fresh races, are to be found chiefly the Scandinavian archaeologists, amongst whom may be especially mentioned Professors Worsaae, of Copenhagen[202], and Nilsson, of Stockholm. Both metals are foreign to the soil of Denmark, and must, therefore, have been imported. In the graves, bronze weapons are in Denmark invariably found with burials by cremation, while those of the stone age are by inhumation, the former being recognized, in an early stage of civilization, as a later process than burial by inhumation. Bronze is here markedly associated with traces of agriculture, the evidence of which is wanting in the stone age. The age of bronze, it is asserted by these antiquaries, was ushered in in Denmark by the employment of implements showing the highest perfection of art, and at a later period, when they are associated with weapons of iron, they are inferior in the quality of their workmanship. The weapons of bronze have remarkably small handles, denoting a smaller race, and hypothetically an eastern origin, small handles being to this day the characteristic of weapons from India. Some of the bronze spear-heads in Denmark have been found with nails driven into them, a practice which still exists in India, each nail denoting a victim; and in the Asiatic islands the custom of boring a hole in the weapon for each victim is found to the present time.[203] The peculiar ornamentation so often found on the bronze swords of Denmark, known as the spiral ornament, is said, though I think erroneously, to be of Phoenician origin. To these and other arguments for the introduction by intruding races, Professor Nilsson adds, that in the countries of the north, where bronze implements are found in greatest abundance, the graves in which they occur are usually situated in groups, proving that bronze was introduced, not by isolated individuals, merchants, or travellers, but by tribes or colonies more or less numerous, occupying especial tracts of country.

The theory of race-origin is also not without its adherents in this country. Dr. Thurnam, who has excavated a large number of barrows in the south of England, divides them--as, indeed, they have been divided by former antiquaries--into several classes, amongst which we may chiefly distinguish two principal types, viz. the long and the round barrows. The former he attributes to the stone age, containing usually implements of that material, whilst implements of bronze are almost invariably found in the round barrows. He also gives it as the result of his researches, extending over some years of exploration--and Canon Greenwell, in so far as his experience of long barrows in the north of England goes, confirms the statement--that the long barrows are generally associated with dolichocephalic, or long skulls, whilst in the round barrows brachycephalic, or round skulls, are found, thus leading to the supposition that the long-headed people of the stone age who erected the long barrows may have been succeeded by another race with round heads importing bronze, and burying their dead in round barrows. But after having heard Dr. Thurnam’s last papers on this subject, read before the Society of Antiquaries and other societies[204], I confess, although he has no doubt established a sequence, that he does not appear to me to have determined a clear line of separation between the two classes of interments; the long barrows pass by intermediate links into the round ones, and the long skull, although no doubt it may be considered characteristic of an earlier period, and therefore connected with an earlier form of barrow, also passes by gradations into the round skull, the variations of form being considerable. Then, with respect to the implements, although the absence of bronze in the long barrows of the earlier period appears to be determined, yet it is notorious to all those who have paid attention to the subject--and is not by any means denied by the learned antiquaries whose names I have mentioned--that the transition from stone to bronze in this country was gradual, and extended over a long period, flint weapons being found in nearly all the barrows of the bronze age in such positions as to show they were used contemporaneously by the same people; and from discoveries which have been made both by myself and others[205], there seems good reason to suppose that flint weapons continued to be used by some of the inhabitants of this country even during the Roman era. This distinction of long heads in long barrows, and round heads in round barrows, is one so easily remembered, that it is liable on this account, perhaps, to receive greater attention than it really deserves as a criterion of race. The difficulty of distinguishing in all cases the primary from the secondary interments in the barrows--it being an established fact that these barrows were used as places of burial by successive generations, and even perhaps by successive races, including also the Anglo-Saxons--the possible distortion of some of the crania by time and pressure, and the other facts of the case, as I believe I have correctly stated them, are, I think, sufficient to justify us in withholding for the present our entire acceptance of the theory of the introduction of bronze into this country by intruding races, as drawn from any evidence derived from the graves.

From amongst those who have advocated the totally independent origin of bronze, the opinion of Professor Daniel Wilson may be selected, as affording a most ingenious argument derived from an analysis of the metals.[206] He quotes some experiments conducted by Dr. George Pearson, and communicated by him to the Royal Society of London in 1796, to ascertain the results of various proportions of the ingredients of tin and copper in bronze. ‘Having fused these metals in various united proportions, commencing with 1 part of tin to 20 parts of copper, which produced a dark-coloured bronze, he reduced the proportion gradually to 15 parts of copper to 1 of tin, when the colour was materially affected, and the red copper hue was no longer seen, but an alloy of greater strength was produced. The experiments were continued with 12, 10, 9, 8, and 7 parts of copper to 1 of tin, and when the last fusion of the metals was tested, increased hardness and brittleness of the metals became very apparent. The same characteristics were still more marked on successively reducing the proportions of copper to 6, 5, 4, and 3; and when alloy was made of 2 parts of copper to 1 of tin, it was, according to Dr. Pearson’s report, as brittle as glass.’

From the result of these experiments we see that the best average proportions, of about 9 parts of copper to 1 of tin, would invariably show itself by a practical experience in the use of these ingredients, and it is therefore unnecessary to assume that these particular proportions, when found in the bronzes of different countries, must necessarily have been communicated.

Dr. Wilson then proceeds to give the results of analyses of ancient bronzes discovered in Europe, America, and elsewhere, contained in the accompanying tables. And he concludes his observations on the subject as follows:--

‘From the varied results which so many independent analyses disclose, varying, as they do, from 79 to 94 per cent, of copper, or more than the total amount of the supposed constant ratio of tin, besides the variations in the nature, as well as the quantity of their ingredients’ (a proportion of lead will be seen in some of the analyses of European bronzes, the small proportion of iron being probably accidental), ‘it is abundantly obvious that no greater uniformity is traceable than such as might be expected to result from the experience of isolated and independent metallurgists, very partially acquainted with the chemical properties of the standard alloy, and guided for the most part by practical experience derived from successive results of their manufacture.’ The comparison of the two tables here given, from Professor Wilson’s work, also shows a smaller average amount of tin in the American bronze (Table I) than in that of ancient Europe (Table II).

TABLE I.--ANALYSES OF ANCIENT AMERICAN BRONZES

+---------+-----------------+-------+-----+-----+ Object. |Locality.| Observer. |Copper.| Tin.|Iron.| --------------------------+---------+-----------------+-------+-----+-----+ 1 Chisel from Silver Mines|Cuzco |Humboldt |94.0 |6.0 | | 2 Chisel „ „ |Cuzco |Dr. J. H. Gibbon |92.385 |7.615| | 3 Knife „ „ |Atacama |J. H. Blake, Esq.|97.870 |2.130| | 4 Knife | | Ditto |96.0 |4.0 | | 5 Crowbar |Chili |Dr. T. C. Jackson|92.385 |7.615| | 6 Knife |Amaro |Dr. H. Croft |95.664 |3.965|0.371| 7 Perforated Axe | | Ditto |96.0 |4.0 | | 8 Personal Ornament |Truigilla|T. Ewbank, Esq. |95.440 |4.560| | 9 Bodkin from Female Grave| | Ditto |96.70 |3.30 | | --------------------------+---------+-----------------+-------+-----+-----+

TABLE II.--ANALYSES OF ANCIENT EUROPEAN BRONZES

+--------------+----------------+-------+-----+-----+----- Object. | Locality. | Observer. |Copper.|Tin. |Lead.|Iron. ----------------+--------------+----------------+-------+-----+-----+----- 1 Lituus |Lincolnshire |Dr. G. Pearson, | 88.0 |12.0 | | | | F.R.S., Phil. | | | | | | Trans. | | | | 2 Anglo-Roman | | Ditto ditto | 86.0 |14.0 | | Patellae | | | | | | 3 Spear-Head | | Ditto ditto | 86.0 |14.0 | | 4 Scabbard |Danish? | Ditto ditto | 90.0 |10.0 | | 5 Axe-Head |Ireland | Ditto ditto | 91.0 | 9.0 | | 6 Axe-Palstave |Cumberland | Ditto ditto | 91.0 | 9.0 | | 7 Axe-Head | | Ditto ditto | 88.0 |12.0 | | 8 Bronze Vessel|Cambridgeshire|Professor Clark,| 88.0 |12.0 | | | | M.D. | | | | 9 Sword |France |Mongez, Mémoires| 87.47 |12.53| | | | de l’Institut | | | | 10 Caldron |Berwickshire |G. Wilson, M.D.,| 92.89 | 5.15| 1.78| | | Prehist. | | | | | | Ann. Scot. | | | | 11 Sword |Duddingstone | Ditto ditto | 88.51 | 9.30| 2.30| 12 Kettle |Berwickshire | Ditto ditto | 88.22 | 5.63| 5.88| 13 Axe-Head |Mid-Lothian | Ditto ditto | 88.5 |11.12| 0.78| 14 Caldron |Duddingstone | Ditto ditto | 84.8 | 7.19| 8.53| 15 Palstave |Fifeshire | Ditto ditto | 81.19 |18.31| 0.75| 16 Sword |Ireland |Professor Davy, | 88.63 | 8.54| 2.83| | | Prehist. | | | | | | Ann. Scot. | | | | 17 Sword | | Ditto ditto | 83.50 | 5.15| 8.35| 3.0 18 Sword |Thames |J. A. Phillips, | 89.69 | 9.58| | 0.33 | | F.G.S., &c. | | | | 19 Sword |Ireland | Ditto | 85.62 |10.02| | 0.44 20 Celt | | Ditto | 90.68 | 7.43| 1.28| 21 Axe-Head | | | 90.18 | 9.81| | 22 Axe-Head | | Ditto | 89.33 | 9.19| | 0.33 23 Celt | | Ditto | 83.61 |10.79| 3.20| 0.58 24 Celt |King’s County,|Dr. Donovan, | 85.23 |13.11| 1.14| | Ireland | Chem. Gazette | | | | 25 Drinking-Horn| | | 79.34 |10.87| 9.11| 26 Bronze Vessel|Ireland |Mr Gibbon, | 88.0 |12.0 | | | | U.S. Mint | | | | 27 Wedge | | Ditto | 94.0 | 5.9 | | 0.1 ----------------+--------------+----------------+-------+-----+-----+-----