The Lost Atlantis and Other Ethnographic Studies. Sir Daniel Wilson
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,