Page:The Ancient Stone Implements (1897).djvu/102

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CHIPPED OR ROUGH-HEWN CELTS.
[CHAP. IV.

away in the loose chalk when chipped out and accidentally left there. Others are broken; not, I think, in use, but in the process of manufacture. A great proportion are very rude, and illadapted for being ground. They are, in fact, such as may be regarded, if not as wasters, yet, at all events, as unmarketable; for it seems probable that at Cissbury, as well as at other manufactories of flint implements, they were produced, not for immediate use by those who made them, but to be bartered away for some other commodities. In Central America,[1] at the present day, the natives use cutting instruments of flint, which must, apparently, have been brought from a distance of four hundred miles; while, among the aborigines of Australia,[2] flints were articles of barter between distant tribes; and some of the chalcedony implements in the early Belgian caves are made of material presumed to have come from the south of France. Mr. W. H. Holmes,[3] has described an ancient quarry in the Indian territory, Missouri, from which chert was obtained and roughed out on the spot. Some of the rude forms exactly resemble the "turtle backs" of Trenton, by many regarded as palæolithic. The antiquity of the quarry does not, however, exceed two hundred years. Only a single fragment of a polished celt was found by General Pitt Rivers within the inclosure; though another was found by Lord Northesk in a pit that he subsequently opened. They are equally rare in proportion at Spiennes. This fact, and the absence of grinding-stones, also seem to show that the process of grinding was carried on elsewhere, in cases where a ground edge was required.

General Pitt Rivers suggests a question, whether the implements found at Cissbury belong to the Neolithic or Palæolithic age, and seems almost to regard the distinction between the implements of those two ages as founded merely on the minor point of whether they are chipped simply, or also polished. The associated fauna in this case is however purely Neolithic or, as Professor Boyd Dawkins would call it, Pre-historic; and whatever may be the case with a few of the specimens which resemble in form implements from the River Drift, the greater number are unmistakeably of forms such as are constantly found polished, and are undoubtedly Neolithic. Indeed, as already stated, a portion of at all events one polished specimen has been found in one of the

  1. Jour. Anth. Soc., 1869, p. cxii.
  2. Trans. Ethnol. Soc., N. S., vol. iii., p. 269.
  3. Smiths. Inst. Rep., 1894.