A Book of Dartmoor: Second EditionBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
A Book of Dartmoor: Second Edition
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Dartmoor (England)
The dolmen-builders were people with flocks and herds, and who
cultivated grain and spun yarn. Their characteristic implement is
the so-called celt, in reality an axe, sometimes perforated for the
reception of a handle, most commonly not. The perforation belongs to
the latest stage of Neolithic civilisation. Their weapons, or tools,
were first ground. In about a score of places in France polishing rocks
exist, marked with the furrows made by the axe when worked to and fro
upon them, and others that are smaller have been removed to museums.
At Stoney-Kirk, in Wigtownshire, a grinding-stone of red sandstone,
considerably hollowed by use, was found with a small, unfinished axe
of Silurian schist lying upon it. In the recent exploration of hut
circles at Legis Tor a grindstone was found in one of the habitations,
and on it an incomplete tool that was abandoned there before it was
finished.
After grinding, these implements underwent laborious polishing by
friction with the hand or with leather.
At the same time that these artificially smoothed tools were
fabricated, flint was used, beautifully chipped and flaked, to
form arrow and spear heads and swords. The arrow-heads are either
leaf-shaped or tanged.
The pottery of the dolmen-builders is very rude. It is made of clay
mingled with coarse fragments of stone or shell, is very thick and
badly tempered; it is hand-made, and seems hardly capable of enduring
exposure to a brisk fire. The vessels have usually broad mouths, with
an overhanging rim like a turned-back glove-cuff, and below this the
vessel rapidly slopes away. The ornamentation is constant everywhere.
It consisted of zigzags, chevrons, depressions made by twisted cord,
and finger-nail marks in rings round the bowls or rims. It was not till
late in the Bronze Age that circles and spirals were adopted.
Celtic ornamentation is altogether different.
Whilst the long-headed dolmen-builder crept along the coast of Europe,
there was growing up among the mountains and lakes of Central Europe
a hardy round-headed race--the Aryan, destined to be his master. Was
it through instinct of what was to be, that the Ivernian shrank from
penetrating into the heart of the Continent, and clung to the seaboard?
When the dolmen-builder arrived in Britain, to the best of our
knowledge, he found no one there. On the Continent, on the other hand,
if he went far inland, he not only clashed with the Aryan round-heads,
but also here and there stumbled on the lingering remains of the
primeval Palæolithic people, who have left their remains in England in
the river-drift, and in Devon in the Brixham caves and Kent's Hole.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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