(Saône et Loire).[1] Some seem to have been found at Vauvray,[2] in making the railway from Paris to Rouen. Others were discovered in company with arrow-heads, celts, and trimmed flakes of flint, in the Dolmen,[3] or Allée couverte, of Argenteuil (Seine et Oise). These are now in the Musée de St. Germain. Others were found in a cavern on Mont Sargel (Aveyron).[4] They occasionally occur in Germany. One from Dienheim is in the Central Museum at Mayence.
Discoveries of these stag's-horn sockets for stone tools in England seem to be extremely rare. Mr. Albert Way describes one, of which a woodcut is given in the Archæological Journal.[5] It is formed of the horn of the red deer (which is erroneously described as being extinct), and is said to have been found with human remains and pottery of an early character at Cockshott Hill, in Wychwood Forest, Oxfordshire. It seems better adapted for mounting a small celt as a chisel, like that of bronze found in a barrow at Everley,[6] than for forming part of a hatchet. Mr. Way[7] cites several cases of the discovery of these stag's-horn sockets in France and elsewhere on the continent of Europe. I may add, by way of caution, that numerous forgeries of them have been produced at Amiens. In some of the genuine specimens from the peat of the valley of the Somme,[8] the stone was fixed in a socket bored in one end of the piece of stag's horn, and the shaft was inserted in another hole bored through the horn. M. Boucher de Perthes describes the handle of one as made of a branch of oak, burnt at each end.
An example of this method of mounting is given in Fig. 99a. The original was found at Penhouet, Saint Nazaire sur Loire,[9] in 1877. The length of the haft is 1912 inches. A fine socket with the blade still in it, but without the shaft, has been figured by the Baron Joseph de Baye.[10] It was found in La Marne, in which department funereal grottoes have been discovered, at the entrances of which similar hafted axes were sculptured.
The socket discovered by the late Lord Londesborough in a barrow, near Scarborough,[11] appears to have been a hammer,
- ↑ "Note sur un Foyer, &c.," Châlon, 1870, pl. iv.
- ↑ Cochet, "Seine Inf.," 2nd ed., p. 16.
- ↑ Rev. Arch., vol. xv. p. 364, pl. viii.; Mortillet, "Promenades," p. 123.
- ↑ Matériauz, vol. v. p. 96.
- ↑ Vol. xxi. p. 54. See also vol. xiv. p. 82.
- ↑ Hoare's "South Wilts," pl. xxi.
- ↑ Arch. Journ., vol. xxi. p. 54.
- ↑ B. de Perthes' "Antiquités Celtiques, &c.," vol. i. p. 282, pl. i., ii.
- ↑ Rev. Arch., vol. xxxv. p. 307, whence the cut is copied on a reduced scale.
- ↑ Arch. Préh., 1880, p. 99, pl. i. and v. Mat., vol. xvi. p. 298.
- ↑ Arch. Assoc. Journ., vol. iv. p. 105. Supra, p. 148.
