There hardly appears to be sufficient cause for believing that any of the stone hatchets found in this country were chipped out by any other means than by direct blows of a hammer; but in the case of the Danish axes with square sides, and with their corners as neatly crimped or puckered as if they had been made of pieces of leather sewn together, it is probable that this neat finish was produced by the use of some kind of punch or set. The hammer-stones used in the manufacture of flint hatchets appear to have been usually quartzite pebbles, where such are readily to be obtained, but also frequently to have been themselves mere blocks of flint. Many such hammer-stones of flint occurred in the Cissbury pits[105]—of which more hereafter—and I have found similar hammer-stones on the Sussex Downs, near Eastbourne, where also flint implements of various kinds appear to have been manufactured in quantities. Not improbably, these hammers were made of flints which had been for some time exposed on the surface, and which were in consequence harder than the flints recently dug from the pits. We have already seen that the gun-flint knappers of the present day are said to work most successfully on blocks of flint recently extracted, and those, too, from a particular layer in |33| the chalk; and it seems probable that the ancient flint-workers were also acquainted with the advantages of using the flints fresh from the quarry, and worked them into shape at the pits from which they were dug, not only on account of the saving in transport of the partly-manufactured articles, but on account of the greater facility of working the freshly-extracted flints. This working the flints upon the spot is conclusively shown by the examination of the old flint-quarry at Cissbury, Sussex, by General Pitt Rivers (then Colonel A. Lane-Fox) and others. A very large number of hatchets, more or less perfectly chipped out, were there found, as will subsequently be mentioned. That they were in some cases at great pains to procure flint of the proper quality for being chipped into form, and were not content with blocks and nodules, such as might be found on the surface, is proved by the interesting explorations at Grime’s Graves, near Brandon, carried on by Canon Greenwell, F.R.S.[106]