We are apt to think of the old flint and stone-workers as merely picking
up the chance materials suited to their simple craft. But the use of
flint in the manufacture of sling-stones, arrow-heads, and other missile
weapons, as well as of all ordinary household implements, and those of
war and the chase, involved a constant demand for fresh materials,
frequently procurable only from distant localities. It is what might be
assumed, therefore, apart from any direct evidence, that a regular
system of quarrying for flint nodules best fitted for the tool-makers’
art was pursued; and that a trade or barter in the raw material
furnished supplies to tribes remote from the flint-bearing chalk or
gravel. But also it appears from the interesting explorations of Colonel
A. Lane Fox at Cissbury, near Worthing,[33] and from those of the Rev.
W. Greenwell, at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, in Norfolk,[34] that the
flint nodules were not only quarried, but prepared on the spot; so that
the miner carried off with him, not a mere load of flint nodules, as the
modern manufacturer might burden himself with the iron ore: but flints
of the required dimensions, roughly shaped for the final operation which
was to fashion them into knives, scrapers, arrow and lance-heads,
hatchets, etc. Precisely the same process is manifest in the remains
found in the pits of Flint Ridge, Ohio. Flakes or spawls, knives,
scrapers, almond and lanceolate blocks, abound in the first crude stage
of manufacture. In studying those on the spot, I was strongly impressed
by the similarity of many of them to the ruder implements of the drift;
and hence was led to surmise that in the latter also we have in many
cases, not the artless implements which fitly suggest a maker
correspondingly deficient in even such skill and reasoning as guides the
modern tool-making savage; but only rudely-blocked flints, fresh from
the quarry, and in a condition least susceptible of injury in the
violence to which the tool-bearing gravels have necessarily been
subjected. May it not be, moreover, that in some of the richest deposits
of such worked flints in the gravels of France and England, we have
really the dispersed materials of such quarry accumulations, and not the
stray implements of individual hunters? In this way only can we
satisfactorily account for the fact that such traces of primeval man are
now successfully sought for on purely geological evidence. The
archæologist digs into the Celtic or Saxon barrow, and finds as his
reward the implements and pottery of its builder. But English
geologists, having determined the character of the tool-bearing gravel
of the French drift, have sought for flint implements in corresponding
English strata, as they would seek for the fossil shells of the same
period, and with like success. They have now been obtained in Suffolk,
Bedford, Hartford, Kent, Middlesex, and Surrey.[35] So entirely indeed
has the man of the drift passed out of the province of the archæologist,
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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