.
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.
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