acknowledgment of its adaptability for making such pins; in the same way as its concomitant tibia was the bone best adapted for making into flutes.
Bone pins, perforated at one end, were found in several of the barrows explored by the late Mr. Bateman,[1] both with burnt and unburnt bodies. Canon Greenwell has also found them in the Yorkshire tumuli; in three instances with burnt bodies. I found one also in a disturbed barrow at Sutton Cheney, Leicestershire, which I opened in 1851. Others without the hole, some of which are termed spear-heads by Mr. Bateman, were found in Derbyshire and Staifordshire barrows,[2] with burnt and unburnt bodies, associated with instruments and arrow-heads of flint. Another was found with burnt bones in a barrow at Hacpen Hill,[3] Wilts; and part of one in the Long Barrow at West Kennet.[4]
It seems probable that many of these pointed instruments may have been used as awls, for making holes in leather and soft materials. Others, as Mr. Bateman and Canon Greenwell suggest, may, with the unburnt bodies, have fastened some kind of shroud; and with the burnt, have served to pin a cloth in which the ashes were placed, after being collected from the funeral pile.
In the Heathery Burn Cave, where so many interesting bronze relics were found, there also occurred a large number of bone pins or awls, a cylindrical bone bead 710 inch long, a bone tube 112 inches long with a small perforation at the side, a pierced disc of bone 158 inches in diameter and 14 inch thick, and a flat bone blade, somewhat resembling in form a modern paper-cutter, 734 inches long and 114 inches broad. This same flat form of instrument, about 612 inches long and 34 inch broad, occurred in the Green Low Barrow,[5] Derbyshire, but then, in company with a fine flint dagger and stemmed and barbed arrow-heads, and with a bone pin. Mr. Bateman[6] thought that these instruments might have served as modelling tools for making pottery, or as mesh rules for netting. One, 12 inches long, with a drinking-cup and various instruments of flint, accompanied a contracted interment in a rock-grave on Smerrill Moor,[7] Derbyshire. With a similar interment in a barrow on Haddon Field[8] was one 614 inches long, cut from the horn of a red-deer, a flint arrow-head, and a small bronze awl. Two others, cut from the ribs of a large animal, and two barbed flint arrow-heads, were found inside a "drinking-cup" at the head of a contracted skeleton in Mouse Low;[9] and others, again, with barbed flint arrow-heads, occurred with calcined bones at Ribden Low.[10] They have also been found in Dorsetshire, perforated.[11] Whether these instruments really served the purposes suggested by Mr. Bateman it is impossible to determine; but they seem well adapted either for finishing off the surface of clay vessels, or for netting, an art with which the Swiss Lake-dwellers of Robenhausen[12]- ↑ "Ten Years' Diggings," pp. 75, 114. "Cran. Brit.," vol. ii. pl. 60, p. 2.
- ↑ "Ten Years' Dig.," pp. 44, 77, 83, 112.
- ↑ "Salisb. Vol. Arch. Inst.," p. 91.
- ↑ Arch., xxxviii. p. 413.
- ↑ "Cran. Brit.," vol. ii. pl. 41, p. 3. "Vest. Ant. Derb.," p. 60.
- ↑ Catalogue, p. 5.
- ↑ "Ten Years' Dig.," p. 103.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 107.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 116. Arch. Assoc. Journ., vii. p. 215.
- ↑ Op. cit., p. 127.
- ↑ Arch. Journ., v. p. 352.
- ↑ Keller, "Lake-dwellings," p. 328.
