Dr. Munro is less than kind to the forger in the matter of the “weapons” found at Dunbuie and Dumbuck. They are “absolutely worthless as real weapons,” he says, with perfect truth, for they are made of slate or shale, not of hard stony slate, which many races used to employ for lack of better material. [112a]
The forger was obviously not thinking of dumping down serviceable sham weapons. He could easily have bought as many genuine flint celts and arrow-heads and knives as he needed, had his aim been to prove his sites to be neolithic. So I argued long ago, in a newspaper letter. Dr. Munro replies among other things, that “nothing could be easier than to detect modern imitations of Neolithic relics.” [112b] I said not a word about
“modern imitations.” I said that a forger, anxious to fake a Neolithic site, “would, of course, drop in a few Neolithic arrow-heads, ‘celts’ and so forth,” meaning genuine objects, very easily to be procured for money.
As the forger did not adopt a device so easy, so obvious, and so difficult of detection, (if he purchased Scottish flint implements) his aim was not to fake a Neolithic site. He put in, not well-known genuine Neolithic things, but things of a character with which some of his critics were not familiar, yet which have analogues elsewhere.
Why did he do that?
As to the blunt decorated slate weapons, the forger did not mean, I think, to pass off these as practicable arms of the Neolithic period. These he could easily have bought from the dealers. What he intended to dump down were not practical weapons, but, in one case at least, armes d’apparat, as French archaeologists call them, weapons of show or ceremony.
The strange “vandyked” crozier-like stone objects of schist or shale from Portugal were possibly armes d’apparat, or heads of staves of dignity. There is a sample in the American room at the British Museum, uninscribed. I submit that the three very curious and artistic stone axe-heads,
figured by M. Cartailhac, [114] representing, one an uncouth animal; another, a hooded human head, the third an extremely pretty girl, could never have been used for practical purposes, but were armes d’apparat. Perhaps such stone armes d’apparat, or magical or sacred arms, were not unknown, as survivals, in Scotland in the Iron Age. A “celt” or stone axe-head of this kind, ornamented with a pattern of inter-crossing lines, is figured and described by the Rev. Mr. Mackenzie (Kenmore) in the Proceedings of the Scottish Society of Antiquaries (1900-1901, p. 310 et seq.). This axe-head, found near a cairn at Balnahannait, is of five inches long by two and a quarter broad. It is of “soft micaceous stone.” The owners must have been acquainted with the use of the metals, Mr. Mackenzie thinks, for the stone exhibits “interlaced work of a late variety of this ornamentation.” Mr. Mackenzie suggests that the ornament was perhaps added “after the axe had obtained some kind of venerated or symbolical character.” This implies that a metal-working people, finding a stone axe, were puzzled by it, venerated it, and decorated it in their late style of ornament.