Part 10

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.

The shallow depressions on the surface, which guide the explorer to those shafts of the ancient workmen, are analogous to others that reveal the funnel-shaped excavations hereafter described, on Flint Ridge, the sites of ancient flint pits of the American arrow-makers. In France, Germany, and Switzerland, as well as in Great Britain, many localities are no less familiar, on which the refuse flakes, and chippings of flint and other available material, show where they have been systematically fashioned into implements. The Museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland has acquired numerous interesting additions to its collections of objects of this class by encouraging systematic research. From the sands at Colvin and Findhorn, Morayshire; Little Ferry, Sutherlandshire; and from Burghhead, Drainie, and Culbin sands, Elginshire, nearly seven thousand specimens have been recovered, consisting chiefly of flint flakes and chippings; but also including several hundred arrow heads, knives, and scrapers, many of them unfinished or broken.

Thus, in various localities, remote from native sources of flint, a systematic manufacture of implements appears to have been carried on. There can, therefore, be scarcely any hesitation in inferring, from the evidence adduced, first a trade in the raw material brought from the distant localities of the flint mines; and then a local traffic in the manufactured implements, as was undoubtedly the case among the American aborigines at no remote date. This aspect of primitive interchange, both of the raw material and the products of industrial skill, in so far as it is illustrated in the practice of the American Indian tribes, merits the most careful study, as a help to the interpretation of the archæological evidence pertaining to prehistoric times. To the superficial observer, stone is of universal occurrence; and it seems, therefore, needless to inquire where the implement-maker of any Stone age procured the rough block out of which he fashioned his weapon or tool. Only when copper, bronze, and iron superseded the crude material of the Stone age has it been supposed to be needful to determine the sources of supply. But that is a hasty and wholly incorrect surmise. The untutored savage is indeed greatly limited in his choice of materials. We are familiar with the shell-workers of the Caribbees and the Pacific Islands, and the horn and ivory workers of Arctic regions; but where the resources of an ample range could be turned to account, the primitive workman learned at a very early date to select by preference such stones as break with a conchoidal fracture. Only where such could not be had, the most available chance-fractured chip or the apt water-worn stone was turned to account. Rude implements are accordingly met with fashioned of trap, sienite, diorite, granite, and other igneous rocks, as well as from quartzite, agate, jasper, serpentine, and slate. Some of those materials were specially favoured by the neolithic workmen for certain classes of their carefully finished weapons and implements, such as perforated hammers, large axes, gouges, and chisels. But the natural cleavage of the flint, and the sharp edge exposed by every fracture, adapt it for fashioning the smaller knives, lance and arrow heads, in a way no other material except obsidian equals. Hence flint appears to have been no less in request among ancient tool-makers than copper, tin, and iron in the later periods of metallurgic art.

The fact that tin is a metal of rare occurrence, though found in nearly inexhaustible quantities in some regions, has given a peculiar significance to certain historical researches, apart from the special interest involved in the processes of the primitive metallurgist, and the widely diffused traces of workers in bronze. The comparative rarity of flint, and its total absence in many localities, suggest a like inquiry into the probable sources of its supply in regions remote from its native deposits. The flint lance or arrow head, thrown by an enemy, or wrested from the grasp of a vanquished foe, would, as in the case of improved weapons of war in many a later age, first introduce the prized material to the notice of less favoured tribes. As the primitive tool-maker learned by experience the greater adaptability of flint than of most other stones for the manufacture of his weapons and implements, it may be assumed that it became an object of barter in localities remote from those where it abounds; and thus, by its diffusion, it may have constituted a recognised form of _pecunia_ ages before the barter of pastoral tribes gave rise to the peculiar significance attached to that term.

One piece of confirmatory evidence of trade in unwrought flint is the frequent occurrence of numerous flint flakes among the prized gifts deposited with the dead. Canon Greenwell describes, among the contents of a Yorkshire barrow in the parish of Ganton, a deposit of flint flakes and chippings numbering one hundred and eighteen, along with a few finished scrapers and arrow heads;[24] and smaller deposits of like kind are repeatedly noted by him. Still more, he describes their occurrence under circumstances which suggest the probability of the scattering of flint flakes, like an offering of current coin, by the mourners, as the primitive grave was covered in and the memorial mound piled over the sacred spot. Flints and potsherds, he says, occur more constantly, and even more abundantly than bones; and this presents to his mind a difficult problem, in considering which he refers to an analogous practice of a very diverse age. The maimed rites at poor Ophelia’s grave are familiar to the reader of _Hamlet_. The priest replies to the demand of Laertes for more ample ceremony at his sister’s burial:—

But that great command o’ersways the order, She should in ground unsanctified have lodged Till the last trumpet; for charitable prayers, Shards, flints, and pebbles should be thrown on her.

The flints and potsherds, Canon Green well remarks, “occur at times in very large quantities, the flints generally in the shape of mere chippings and waste pieces, but often as manufactured articles, such as arrow points, knives, saws, drills and scrapers, etc.” He further notes that they are found distributed throughout the sepulchral mound, “in some instances in such quantities as to suggest the idea that the persons who were engaged in throwing up the barrow, scattered them from time to time during the process.” Assuredly whatever motive actuated those who contributed such objects while the sepulchral mound was in progress of erection, they were not designed as any slight to the manes of the dead. In districts remote from those where the flint abounds, flakes and chips of the prized material must have been in constant demand to replenish the sheaf of arrows, and replace the lost or broken lance, knife, and scraper. The trader would barter the raw material for furs and other equivalents, or the industrious miner would carry off an adequate supply for his own future use. Such small objects, possessing a universally appreciable value, would be as available for current change as the African cowrie, the Ioqua shells of the Pacific coast, or the wampum-beads of the tribes to the east of the Rocky Mountains. If this assumption be correct, the scattering of flint flakes, while the mound was being piled over the grave, was a form of largess not less significant than any later tribute of reverence to the dead.

The sources whence such supplies of raw material of the old flint-worker were derived, have been sufficiently explored to furnish confirmatory evidence of some, at least, of the deductions suggested by other indications thus far noted. The archæologists of Europe are now familiar with many localities which have been the quarries and workshops, as well as the settled abodes, of palæolithic and neolithic man; nor are such unknown in America, though research has to be greatly extended before definite conclusions can be accepted relative to the earliest presence of man on the western continent. Flint and stone implements of every variety of form, and nearly every degree of rudeness, abound in the soil of the New World. But in estimating the true significance of such evidence, it has to be borne in remembrance that its indigenous population has not even now abandoned the arts of their Stone period. Implements have already been referred to still in use among the Shoshone, Texas, and other living tribes, ruder than any yet recovered from the river-drift of France or England; whilst others, more nearly resembling the palæolithic types of Europe, have been met with, some of them imbedded in the rolled gravels, or glacial drift, and associated with bones of the mastodon and other fossil mammals. But the evidence as to palæolithic origin has been, at best, doubtful. An imperfect flint knife, now in the Museum of the University of Toronto, was recovered from a depth of upwards of fourteen feet, among rolled gravel and gold-bearing quartz of the Grinnel Leads in Kansas Territory. Flint implements from the auriferous gravel of California were produced at the Paris Exposition of 1855. According to the Geological Survey of Illinois for 1866, stone axes and flint spear heads were obtained from a bed of local drift near Alton, underlying the loess, and at the same depth as bones of the mastodon. Similar discoveries have been repeatedly noted in Southern States. The river Chattahoochee, in Georgia, in its course down the Nacoochee valley, flows through a rich auriferous region. Explorers in search for gold have made extensive cuttings through the underlying drift-gravel, down to the slate rock upon which it rests; and during one of these excavations, at a depth of nine feet, intermingled with the gravel and boulders of the drift, three large implements were found, nearly resembling the rude flint hatchets of the drift type. Examples of this class, however, though repeatedly noted, have been too isolated to admit of their use for any such comprehensive inductions as the disclosures of the glacial drift of north-western Europe have justified. The evidence hitherto adduced, when implements of this class have been of flint, has failed to establish their palæolithic age, notwithstanding their recovery from ancient gravels. Implements of flint occur in great abundance throughout vast areas of the American continent. With the fact before us that even now the Stone period of its aborigines has not wholly passed away, careful observation is required in determining the probable age of stray specimens buried even at considerable depths.

But disclosures of an actual American implement-bearing drift appear at length to have been met with in the valley of the Delaware. These show the primitive tool-maker resorting to a granular argillite, the cleavage of which adapted itself to the requirements of his rude art. Professor Shaler, in a report on the age of the Delaware gravel beds, describes this formation as occurring from Virginia northward to Labrador, though it is only in New Jersey and Delaware that the accompanying evidences of human art have been thus far recovered. The New Jersey drift is made up of transported material, including boulders and smaller fragments of granitic, hypogene, sandstone, and limestone rocks, along with water-worn pebbles of the same granular argillite as the characteristic stone implements recovered from it, to which, from their peculiar shape, the name of “turtle-back celts” has been given. There is little true clay in the deposit to give coherence to the mass. The type of pebble is subovate, or discoidal, suggesting its form to be due to the action of running water; and it seems probable that the stone was not quarried out of the living rock, but that the pebbles thus reduced to a convenient form were turned to account by the tool-maker. The researches of Dr. Abbott have been rewarded by the discovery in the drift-gravel of numerous examples of this peculiar type of implement, for which the one material appears to have been used, notwithstanding the varied contents of the drift-gravel in which they occur. As in the case of the French and English river-drift, the fractured material is found in every stage of disintegration. Professor Shaler says: “Along with the perfect-looking implements figured by Dr. Abbott, which are apparently as clearly artificial as the well-known remains of the valley of the Somme, there are all grades of imperfect fragments, down to the pebbles that are without a trace of chipping.” But more recent discoveries in the Delaware valley point to remains of a still earlier age than those described by Dr. Abbott. These naturally attracted attention to the region; for there, for the first time, the American archæologist saw a promise of disclosures corresponding in character to those of the European drift-gravels. A systematic and prolonged series of investigations accordingly carried out by Mr. Hilborne T. Cresson, under the direction of the Peabody Museum, have resulted in fresh disclosures of early American man. The Naaman’s Creek rock-shelter, carefully explored by him, is situated in the State of Delaware, immediately to the south of Mason and Dixon’s line. There in underlying deposits, claimed to be of Post-Glacial age, rudely chipped points and other implements, all of argillite, were found; and at a higher level, others of argillite, but intermingled with bone implements, and fragments of rude pottery, and alongside of these, implements fashioned of quartzite and jasper. The antiquity assigned to the Delaware implements, as determined by the age of the tool-bearing gravel, is much greater than that of the Trenton gravels previously referred to; but though remains of fifteen different species of animals, including fragments of a human skull, were recovered from the cave or rock-shelter, they include none but existing fauna. But the evidence of antiquity is based most confidently on the discovery of palæoliths _in situ_ in the true Philadelphia red gravel. Professor G. F. Wright remarks, in discussing the relative ages of the Trenton and Philadelphia red gravel, that both he and Professor Lewis came to the same conclusion: assigning the deposition of the red gravel to a period when the ice had its greatest extension, and when there was considerable local depression of the land. “During this period of greatest ice-extension and depression, the Philadelphia Red Gravel and Brick Clay were deposited by the ice-laden floods which annually poured down the valley in the summer season. As the ice retreated towards the headwaters of the valley, the period was marked also by a re-elevation of the land to about its present height, when the later deposits of gravel at Trenton took place. Dr. Abbott’s discoveries at Trenton prove the presence of man on the continent at that stage of the Glacial epoch. Mr. Cresson’s discoveries prove the presence of man at a far earlier stage. How much earlier will depend upon our interpretation of the general facts bearing on the question of the duality of the Glacial epoch,”[25]—a branch of the inquiry which it is not necessary to discuss here. It is sufficient to note that this argillite—an altogether inferior material to the flint, or hornstone of later tool-makers,—appears, thus far, to be a characteristic feature of American palæolithic art. The locality of the native rock is still undetermined; but implements fashioned of it have been found in great numbers along the escarpments facing the river Delaware. Professor Shaler describes the material as a curious granular argillite, the like of which, he says, “I do not know in place.” Should the native rock be hereafter identified, with traces of the manufactured celts in its vicinity, it may help to throw light on the age and history of the primitive American implement-makers.