contracted position, and with it two flint celts beautifully chipped and polished at the cutting edges; two flint arrow-heads delicately chipped, two flint knives polished on the edge, and one of them, serrated on the back to serve as a saw; numerous other objects of flint, some red ochre, a small earthenware cup, and a hammer-head of stag's horn.
In Cross Low, near Parwich,[1] a fragment of a celt and a small piece of chipped flint were with a human skeleton in a cist; and a kind of flint axe or tomahawk is reported to have been similarly found in a barrow near Pickering.[2]
In the Gospel Hillock barrow, near Buxton, Captain Lukis, F.S.A., found near the shoulder of a contracted skeleton, a polished flint celt, of which an engraving is given in the Reliquary.[3]
In what appears to have been a tumulus at Seaford,[4] Sussex, celts both whole and broken, and other forms of worked flint, were found, but the account given of the exploration is rather confused.
It will be observed that in these cases stone celts accompany the earliest form of interment with which we are acquainted, that in which the body is deposited in the contracted position. The reason why bodies were interred in that posture appears to be that it was in all probability the usual attitude of sleep, at a period when the small cloak of the day must generally have served as the only covering at night.
In Scotland stone celts seem to be of frequent occurrence in cairns. I have one, already mentioned,[5] which is said to have been found with four others in a cairn on Druim-a-shi, near Culloden.
Three others, of which two have been already described,[6] were discovered in a cairn in Daviot parish, Inverness, together with a cylindrical implement, possibly a pestle, and are now in the National Museum at Edinburgh. Not improbably my specimen came from the same cairn.
Another[7] was found in the Cat's Cairn, Cromartyshire. A second,[8] pointed at the butt, is said to have been found in a "Druidical circle," Aberdeenshire. A third,[9] of black flint, from the parish of Cruden, Aberdeenshire, would seem to have accompanied an interment, as with it was found a necklace of large oblong beads of jet, and rudely shaped pieces of amber.
None, however, of these instances afford any absolute testimony as to their exact or even approximate age, unless, indeed, the jet and amber, if they really accompanied the flint celt, point in that case to a date at all events not far removed from that of the bronze objects with which such necklaces have frequently been found.
In the other cases of interments in barrows, however ancient they may be, it seems probable that they are not those of the earliest occupants of this country, by whom polished stone celts, or those of the same character rough hewn only, were in use. The labour bestowed in the formation of the graves and the erection of the barrows must- ↑ "Vestiges of the Ant. of Derbyshire," p. 49.
- ↑ "Ten Years' Diggings," p. 216.
- ↑ Vol. viii. p. 86.
- ↑ Suss. Arch. Coll. vol. xxxii. p. 175.
- ↑ P. 112 supra.
- ↑ P. 135. See Proc. Soc. Ant. Scot., vol. vi. p. 179.
- ↑ "Cat. Arch. Inst. Mus. at Edinburgh," p. 8.
- ↑ Arch. Journ., vol. viii. p. 422.
- ↑ "Cat. A. I. Mus. at Edin.," p. 10.
