Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and UsesFergusson, James
History
Rude Stone Monuments in All Countries: Their Age and Uses
Fergusson, James
Megalithic monuments
likely to have been in full force in the sixth. It is strange enough
that such a custom, even if only referred to suicides, should have
survived a thousand years of such revolutions and changes of religion
as England was subjected to in those days; but that it should be known
to Christians, after 3000 or 4000 years' disuse, seems hardly possible.
No argument, it appears to me, can be drawn from the different kinds of
pottery found in the tomb. If any one will take the trouble of digging
up the kitchen midden of a villa built within the last ten years, in
a previously uninhabited spot, he will probably find fragments of an
exquisite porcelain vase which the housemaid broke in dusting the
drawing-room chimney-piece. He will certainly find many fragments of
the stoneware used in the dining-room, and with them, probably, some of
the coarser ware used in the dairy, and mixed with these innumerable
"shards" of the flower-pots used in the conservatory. According to
the reasoning customary among antiquaries, this midden must have been
accumulating during 2000 or 3000 years at least, because it would
have taken all that time, or more, before the rude pottery of the
flower-pots could have been developed into the exquisite porcelain
of the drawing-room vase. The argument is, in fact, the same as that
with respect to the flints. It may be taken for granted that men used
implements of bone and stone before they were acquainted with the
use of metal; but what is disputed is that they ceased to use them
immediately after becoming familiar with either bronze or iron. So with
earthenware: men no doubt used coarse, badly formed, and badly burnt
pottery before they could manufacture better; but, even when they could
do so, it is certain that they did not cease the employment of pottery
of a very inferior class; and we have not done so to the present day.
To take one instance among many. There are in the Museum of the Society
of Antiquaries at Edinburgh a series of vessels, hand-made and badly
burnt, and which might easily be mistaken--and often are--for those
found in prehistoric tombs. Yet they were made and used in the Shetland
Islands in the last and even in the present century.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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