Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric PeoplesNadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
History
Manners and Monuments of Prehistoric Peoples
Nadaillac, Jean-François-Albert du Pouget, marquis de
Archaeology; Prehistoric peoples
In other parts of France, similar discoveries have been made; shells
often brought from distant shores, glass beads, amber bowls, hatchets
and celts made of stone foreign to the country. Dr. Prunières presented
to the French Association, when it met at Bordeaux, a collection of
weapons and ornaments which came from the megalithic monuments of
Lozère. M. Cartailhac described at the Prehistoric Congress of
Copenhagen the dolmen of Grailhe (Gard). A skeleton was found beneath
it crouching in a corner; whilst round about it lay a knife, a flint
arrow-head, a vase of coarse pottery, and in the earth forming the
tumulus were picked up twenty arrow-heads, a hatchet of chloromelanite,
with numerous beads and fragments of pottery. Were these offerings to
the dead, or to the infernal deities, given to them in the hope of
propitiating them in favor of the deceased? Beneath the megalith of
Saint Jean d’Alcas were found beads of blue glass and of enamel which
Dr. Prunières, having compared with those in the Campana collection in
the Louvre, thinks are of Phœnician origin. The tumuli of the Pyrenees
have yielded calaïte beads of the shape of small cylinders pierced with
holes; and the dolmen of Breton (Tarn-et-Garonne) eight hundred and
thirty-two necklace beads, some of the shape of a heart. Beneath the
Vauréal dolmen were found five skulls in a row, and near one of them,
that of a woman, lay a necklace made of round bits of bone and slate,
on which hung a little jadeite hatchet as an amulet. These human relics
were also accompanied by a fibrolite celt, numerous little worked
flints, and some fragments of pottery. This arrangement of skulls in a
tomb is very rare, and the only thing I can compare it to is the row of
five horses’ heads placed at the end of the entrance gallery of
Mané-Lud.
At Alt-Sammit (Mecklenburg), were round stone hatchets, flint knives,
fragments of pottery covered with strive and ornaments; at Tenarlo
(Holland), urns and amber beads. At Ancress in the island of Jersey, we
find a regular necropolis dating from Neolithic times, and one hundred
vases or urns of different forms were collected. In the Long Barrow of
West Kennet, too, were found numerous fragments of pottery, and with
these fragments boars’ tusks longer than those of the boar of the
present clay, the bones of sheep, goats, roedeer, pigs, and of a large
species of ox, all of which are probably relics of a funeral feast. At
a little distance from West Kennet the Rev. Doyen Merewether found
several flint implements. Here too, then, as elsewhere, the home of the
living was side by side with the resting-place of the (lead.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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