the decomposition of a piece of iron pyrites. At Worle Hill,[1] Somersetshire, "flint flakes, prepared for arrow-heads," were found with iron spear-heads and other objects, though it is very doubtful whether they were in true association. In Saxon graves,[2] however, small nests of chipped flints are not unfrequent, and the same is the case with Merovingian and Frankish interments, sometimes accompanied by the steels or briquets,[3] at other times without them. I have a wrought flint of this class, curiously like a modern gun-flint, from an early German grave near Wiesbaden. Occasionally flakes of other materials than flint occur. Their presence in graves is regarded by M. Baudot as due to a reminiscence of some ancient rite of sepulchre. In the Anglo-Saxon burial-ground at Harnham Hill,[4] near Salisbury, and at Ozengal, steels were also found. Canon Greenwell found a steel, in form much like those of modern date, in a Saxon grave at Uncleby in the East Riding of Yorkshire. As has been pointed out by Mr. Akerman, Scheffer[5] informs us that so late as the seventeenth century, the Lapps were buried with their axe, bow, and arrows, and a flint and steel, to be used both in a life to come and in finding their way to the scene of their future existence.
Flakes and rudely chipped pieces of flint are also of very common occurrence on the sites of Roman occupation, as, for instance, at Hardham,[6] Sussex, where Prof. Boyd Dawkins found them associated with Roman pottery. At Moel Fenlli,[7] also, in the vale of Clwyd, there occurred with Roman pottery some flint flakes which have been figured as arrow-heads, and with them what is termed a stone knife, but which is, however, more probably a whetstone used to sharpen those of steel. I have myself noticed flint flakes at Regulbium (Reculver), Verulamium (St. Alban's), and on other Roman sites. Many of them were no doubt used for producing fire, but the more finished flakes may possibly have served as carpenters' tools for scraping, in the same way as fragments of glass are in use at the present day.
There is, however, another cause why rude splinters of flint
- ↑ Arch. Assoc. Journ., vol. xii. p. 299.
- ↑ See Arch. Journ., vol. xi. p. 211, and xx. 189; Wright, "Rems. of a Prim. Peop. in Yorksh,," p. 10.
- ↑ See Cochet, "Normandie Souterr.," p. 258; Baudot, "Sép. des Barbares," p. 76; Troyon, "Tombeaux de Bel-Air"; Lindenschmit, "Todtenlager bei Selzen," p. 13.
- ↑ Arch., vol. xxxv. p. 267.
- ↑ "Hist. of Lapland," Ed., 1704, p. 313; Keysler, "Ant. Sept.," p. 173.
- ↑ Sussex Arch. Coll. vol. xvi, p. 63.
- ↑ Arch. Camb., 2nd S., vol. i. p. 88.
