Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822Mallery, Garrick
History
Picture-Writing of the American Indians: Tenth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1888-89, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1893, pages 3-822
Mallery, Garrick
Picture-writing, Indian
But few of the petroglyphs in the civilized portions of Europe not
familiar by publication have that kind of interest which requires their
reproduction in the present paper. It may be sufficient to state in
general terms that Europe is no exception to the rest of the world in
the presence of petroglyphs.
A number of these extant in the British islands and in the Scandinavian
peninsula, besides the few examples presented in this chapter, are
described and illustrated in other parts of this work, and brief
accounts of others recently noted in France, Spain, and Italy are also
furnished.
GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND.
Nearly all of the petroglyphs found in the British islands, accounts
of which have been published, belong to the class of cup sculptures
discussed in Chapter V, infra, but several inscriptions showing
characters not limited to that category are mentioned in “Archaic
Rock Inscriptions,” (_a_) from which the following condensed extract
referring to a cairn in county Meath, Ireland, is taken:
The ornamentation may be thus described: Small circles, with or
without a central dot; two or many more concentric circles; a small
circle with a central dot, surrounded by a spiral line; the single
spiral; the double spiral, or two spirals starting from different
centers; rows of small lozenges or ovals; stars of six to thirteen
rays; wheels of nine rays; flower ornaments, sometimes inclosed in
a circle or wide oval; wave-like lines; groups of lunette-shaped
lines; pothooks; small squares attached to each other side by side,
so as to form a reticulated pattern; small attached concentric
circles; large and small hollows; a cup hollow surrounded by one
or more circles; lozenges crossed from angle to angle (these and
the squares produced by scrapings); an ornament like the spine of
a fish with ribs attached, or the fiber system of some leaf; short
equiarmed crosses, starting sometimes from a dot and small circle;
a circle with rays round it, and the whole contained in a circle; a
series of compressed semicircles like the letters ∩ ∩ ∩ inverted;
vertical lines far apart, with ribs sloping downwards from them like
twigs; an ornament like the fiber system of a broad leaf, with the
stem attached; rude concentric circles with short rays extending
from part of the outer one; an ornament very like the simple Greek
fret, with dots in the center of the loop; five zigzag lines and
two parallel lines, on each of which, and pointing toward each
other, is a series of cones ornamented by lines radiating from the
apex, crossed by others parallel to the base--this design has been
produced by scraping, and I propose to call it the Patella ornament,
as it strikingly resembles the large species of that shell so common
on our coasts, and which shell Mr. Conwell discovered in numbers in
some of the cists, in connection with fragments of pottery and human
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