In the British Museum is a perforated ball of hard red stone of a different type from any of those which I have described, which came from Peru. It is about 3 inches in diameter, with a parallel hole an inch across. Around the outside are engraved four human faces, each surmounted by a sort of mitre. It may be the head of a mace. |233| Spherical mace-heads of marble and of harder rocks occur among Egyptian antiquities. They are sometimes decorated by carving. * * * * * In this place perhaps it will be well to mention a class of large hammer-stones, or mauls, as they have been termed, which, though belonging to a period when metal was in use, are in all probability of a high degree of antiquity. They consist, as a rule, of large oval pebbles or boulders, usually of some tough form of greenstone or grit, around which, somewhere about the middle of their length, a shallow groove has been chipped or “picked,” from 3∕4 inch to 1 inch in width. On the two opposite sides of the pebble, and intersecting this groove, two flat or slightly hollowed faces have often been worked, the purpose of which is doubtless connected with the method of hafting the stones for use as hammers. This was evidently by means of a withe twisted round them, much in the same manner as a blacksmith’s chisel is mounted at the present day. In the case of the mauls, however, the withe appears to have been secured by tying, like the haft of one form of Australian stone hatchets (Fig. 105), and then to have been tightened around the stone by means of wedges driven in between the withe loop and the flat faces before mentioned. A[851] German stone axe seems to have been fastened to its haft in the same manner. * * * * * In many of the Welsh specimens about to be mentioned, the flat faces are absent, and the notch or groove does not extend all round the stone, but exists only on the two sides through which the longer transverse axis of the pebble passes. In this case the wedges, if any, were probably driven in on the flatter side of the boulder. The ends of the pebbles are usually much worn and broken by hammering, and not unfrequently the stone has been split by the violence of the blows that it has administered. It is uncertain whether they were merely used for crushing and pounding metallic ores, or also in mining operations; but with very few exceptions they occur in the neighbourhood of old mines, principally copper-mines.