surface of the ground. Numerous flakes, however, quite as minute, with their edges showing evident signs of wear, are present among the refuse left by the cave-dwellers of the Reindeer Period of the South of France. As will subsequently be seen, these minute flakes have been also found in Egypt and in Asia, as well as in Britain. See Fig. 232a to 232f. There is a class of ancient Scandinavian harpoon-heads, the stems of which are formed of bone with small flint flakes cemented into a groove on either side so as to form barbs. Knives of the same kind are subsequently mentioned.
Among the Australians[1] we find very minute splinters of flint and quartz secured to wooden handles by "black-boy" gum, and forming the teeth of rude saws and the barbs of javelins. Some remarkably small flakes have also been found in the diamond-diggings of South Africa in company with fragments of ostrich-egg shell, such as with the aid of the flakes might have been converted into the small perforated discs still worn as ornaments by the Bushmen.
There are but few published notices of the discovery of English cores of flint, though they are to be found in numbers over a considerable tract of country, especially where flint abounds.
I have recorded their finding at Redhill,[2] near Reigate, and at Little Solsbury Hill,[3] near Bath. I also possess numerous specimens from Herts, Gloucestershire, Sussex, Bedfordshire, Suffolk, and Yorkshire. In several instances two series of flakes have been struck off, the one set at right angles to the other. More rarely the flakes have been obtained from both ends of the block.
A core from the Fens[4] is in the Museum of the Cambridge Antiquarian Society, and several were found, with other worked flints, in the chambered Long Barrow at West Kennet, Wiltshire.
Numerous specimens from Peter's Finger, near Salisbury, and elsewhere, are in the Blackmore Museum; and a number were found by General Pitt Rivers in his researches at Cissbury, Sussex, and by Canon Greenwell at Grime's Graves.[5] Mr. Joseph Stevens has described specimens from St. Mary Bourne,[6] Hants. They are recorded also as found with flakes at Port St. Mary,[7] Isle of Man.
A long bludgeon-shaped nodule of flint, from one end of which a succession of flakes had been struck, was found in a grave, with a contracted skeleton, in a barrow near Winterbourn Stoke,[8] Wilts.
Illustrations of cores, and of the manner in which flakes have been struck from them, have been given by various authors.[9]
The existence of flakes involves the necessity of there having been cores from which they were struck; and as silicious flakes occur in almost all known countries, so also do cores. A series of French nuclei is- ↑ Wood, "Nat. Hist. of Man," vol. ii. pp. 36-38.
- ↑ Proc. Soc. Ant., 2nd S., vol. i. p. 73.
- ↑ Trans. Ethn. Soc., N. S., vol. iv. p. 241.
- ↑ Arch. Journ., vol. xvii. p. 170.
- ↑ Journ. Ethnol. Soc. Lond., vol. ii. p. 430.
- ↑ For neolithic implements from this place, see Trans. Berks. Archæol. and Archit. Soc., 1879-80, p. 49.
- ↑ "Manx Note Book," vol. i. (1885) p. 71.
- ↑ Mem. Anthrop. Soc. Lond., vol. i. p. 142.
- ↑ See Worsaae "Nord. Olds.," No. 60; "Guide to North. Arch.," p. 39; and the authors already cited at p. 272.
