The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments, of Great Britain and Ireland.Evans, John
History
The Ancient Bronze Implements, Weapons, and Ornaments, of Great Britain and Ireland.
Evans, John
Bronze age -- Great Britain; Bronze age -- Ireland; Great Britain -- Antiquities
A more highly ornamented pair of tweezers, with a broad end, found
with a bone comb, a quern, spindle-whorls, &c., in a Picts’ house near
Kettleburn,[690] Caithness, belongs to a considerably later period.
[Illustration: Fig. 229. Llangwyllog.]
[Illustration: Fig. 230. Ireland.]
The needles of bronze found in the British Isles do not as a rule
appear to belong to the Bronze Period, though some of those found
on the Continent seem to date back to that age. Two are engraved by
Wilde,[691] and there are altogether eighteen such articles in the
Museum of the Royal Irish Academy. A broken specimen (1¼ inch) from the
sand-hills near Glenluce,[692] Wigtonshire, has been figured.
Another useful article anciently formed of bronze—though perhaps not,
strictly speaking, a tool—may as well be mentioned in this place;
I mean the fish-hook, of which, however, I am able to cite but one
example as having been found in the British Isles. This was found in
Ireland, and is shown in Fig. 230,[693] kindly lent by the Royal Irish
Academy.
Fish-hooks of bronze have been found in considerable abundance on the
site of several of the Swiss Lake-dwellings; and it is not a little
remarkable that in form many of them are almost identical with the
steel fish-hooks of the present day. The barb, to prevent the fish from
struggling off the hook, is in most instances present, and double hooks
are occasionally found. The attachment to the line was, even in the
single hooks, frequently made by a loop or eye, formed by flattening
and turning back the upper part of the shank of the hook. Fish-hooks
were found in the Fonderie de Larnaud (Jura),[694] and in the hoard of
St. Pierre-en-Châtre (Oise).
Such are the principal forms of tools and instruments of bronze found
in these islands. Some of them, such as the socketed gouges, hammers,
and chisels, can only belong to the latter part of the Bronze Period,
when the art of using cores in order to produce sockets or other hollow
recesses in castings was well known. Others, like the simple awls so
frequently found in company with instruments of flint in our barrows,
appear to extend from the commencement of the Bronze Age to its close.
There still remains to be described a class of instruments in use by
the husbandman, and not by the warrior; and as the present chapter has
extended to such a length, it will be well to treat of these under a
separate heading.
CHAPTER VIII.
SICKLES.
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