Part 9

THE term “Stone Period” or “Stone Age” was suggested in the early years of the present century by the antiquaries of Denmark as the fitting designation of that primitive era in western Europe—with its corresponding stage among diverse peoples in widely severed regions and ages,—when the use of metals was unknown. That there was a period in the history of the human race, before its Tubal-cains, Vulcans, Vœlands, or other Smith-gods appeared, when man depended on stone, bone, ivory, shells, and wood, for the raw material out of which to manufacture his implements and weapons, is now universally admitted; and is confirmed by the abundant disclosures of the drift and the caves. The simple, yet highly suggestive classification, due to Thomsen of Copenhagen, was the first scientific recognition of the fact, now established by evidence derived from periods of vastly greater antiquity than the Neolithic age of Denmark. The accumulated experience of many generations was required before men mastered the useful service of fire in the smelting of ores and the casting of metals. Nevertheless it seems probable that the knowledge of fire, and its useful service on the domestic hearth, are coeval with the existence of man as a rational being. The evidence of its practical application to the requirements for warmth and cooking carry us back to the age of cave implements, including some among the earliest known examples of man’s tool-making industry. In connection with this subject, Sir John Evans draws attention to some curious indications of the antiquity of the use of flint by the fire-producer.[10] He refers to the ingenious derivation of the word _silex_ as given by Vincent of Beauvais, in the _Speculum Naturæ_, “Silex est lapis durus, sic dictus eo quod ex eo ignis exsiliat,” and he recalls a more remarkable reminiscence of the evoking of fire in the Neolithic if not in the Palæolithic period. Pliny informs us (lib. vii. cap. 56), that it was Pyrodes, the son of Cilix, who first devised the way to strike fire out of flint; “A myth,” says Sir John Evans, “which seems to point to the use of silex and pyrites (from πῦρ) rather than of steel.” In reality the flint and pyrites lie together in the same lower strata of the chalk. As the ancient flint-miners sunk their pits in search of the levels where the flint abounds they would meet with frequent nodules of pyrites. The first grand discovery of the fire-producer may have resulted from the use of the pyrites as a mere hammer-stone to break up the larger flints.

But whatever was the source of this all-important discovery, it dates among the earliest manifestations of human intelligence. Nodules of iron pyrites have been found in the caves of France and Belgium, among remains pertaining to the Palæolithic age, and are among the most interesting disclosures of the greatly more modern, though still prehistoric age of the barrows and cairns of the Allophylian period of Britain, and of Western Europe generally. Sir R. C. Hoare records the finding, among the contents of a cinerary urn, in a Wiltshire barrow, “chipped flints prepared for arrow heads, a long piece of flint, and a _pyrites_, both evidently smoothed by usage.”[11] More recent explorers, apprised of the significance of such discoveries, have noted the presence of nodules of pyrites, accompanying the personal ornaments and weapons occurring in graves of the same age: deposited there either as tokens of regard, or more probably with a vague idea of their utility to the dead in the life beyond the grave. In a communication to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland on a group of stone cists disclosed, in 1879, on the farm of Teinside, Teviotdale, Lord Rosehill thus describes part of the contents of one of them. “It was filled with dark-coloured earth, mixed with charcoal; and closely intermingled in every part with fragments of bones which had been exposed to the action of fire.” A broken urn lay about ten inches from the top. “Close to the urn was a rounded piece of metallic-looking substance, which appears to be ‘radiated iron pyrites,’ and which,” adds Lord Rosehill, “I have myself discovered in several interments.”[12] More recently, in 1883, Major Colin Mackenzie reported to the same Society the discovery of a cist and urn in the Black Isle, Ross-shire.[13] He thus proceeds: “Whilst gathering together the broken pieces of the urn, a round-nosed flint-flake or scraper, chipped at the edges, was found amongst the debris, and proved to have a bluish tinge, as if it had been subjected to the action of fire. Close beside it there was found a round piece of iron pyrites, flat on one side, in shape somewhat like the half of an egg, divided lengthways, only smaller. Dr. Joseph Anderson at once recognised this as forming, along with the solitary flint, nothing less than a prehistoric ‘strike-light’ apparatus.”[14] No flint is procurable in the locality; and after the closest search, no other flint implement or flake was found on the site. In communicating this interesting discovery to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, Major Mackenzie reviewed the disclosures of this class in Great Britain, so far as they had been noted by Hoare, Borlase, Bateman, Greenwell and Evans, furnishing a tabulated statement of eleven examples, chiefly found in barrows, and ranging over an area extending from Cornwall to Ross-shire; and to those additions have since been made. He draws attention to their occurrence in localities which produce neither pyrites nor flint. But with the former, at least, this need not surprise us. The prized and easily transported pyrites may be looked for in any ancient barrow or sepulchral deposit, and has probably in many cases passed unnoted before its significance was understood. Now that this is fully appreciated, it is seen to have been in use from the early stages of primitive art: the very dawn of science; and doubtless the pyrites and flint found in localities remote from those where they occur as natural products are in most cases due to primitive barter.

The old Promethean myth represents the fire-bringer interposing on 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.