attached to wooden handles; and the instrument from Acklam Wold seems well adapted for similar attachment, with its flat side towards the wood.
Some bone instruments which have been found in barrows may possibly have served as arrow-flakers. One from Green Low,[1] Derbyshire, has been figured. An implement of deer's horn, with a small piece of hard bone inserted in the small end, was found in the Broch[2] of Lingrow, Scapa, Orkney, but seems to belong to the Iron Period. No flint arrow-heads are recorded from the Broch.
I must confess that the suggestions I have offered with regard to the use of these tools are by no means conclusive. I can only hope that future discoveries may throw more light upon the subject.
Canon Greenwell, who has figured a specimen—like Fig. 346—in the Archæological Journal,[3] was inclined to think that the other form of instrument, like Figs. 348 and 349, was "used in dressing hides, the sharp end for removing the loose parts of the skin, the smooth end for rubbing down the seams when the leather was made up into a garment." I do not think that this can really have been their purpose, as for smoothing down the seams a natural pebble would probably be preferable, and for cutting or removing the loose parts a flint flake would answer better. Still, I have seen a somewhat pointed concretionary nodule of stone, the end and point of which were polished from use by a glovemaker, in recent times, in smoothing down the seams of coarse leather gloves. The late Mr. C. Monkman,[4] like myself, regarded these instruments as punches or fabricators, used for chipping arrows and delicate flint weapons into shape. This is also Canon Greenwell's present opinion. He has figured an example in "British Barrows."[5] In Yorkshire they are known as "finger-flints."
The worn appearance of the pointed end of some flakes is not improbably due, as has already been observed, to their having been employed in "picking" into shape implements—such as hatchets or axes—formed of greenstone and other rocks of a somewhat softer nature than flint. The ends of the flaking tools, punches, or fabricators are, however, usually far too blunt for them to have been applied to such a purpose.
Another of the causes of the blunted and worn-away appearance of the ends, and even sides, of originally sharp flint flakes and instruments, I have already described when treating of scrapers—namely, the striking off by their means particles from a block of pyrites, with a view of procuring fire.
