The man has read widely. Sometimes, however, he may have resorted to sources which, though excellent, are accessible and cheap, like Mr. Haddon’s Evolution in Art. Here (pp. 79, 80) the faker could learn all that he needed to know about armes d’apparat in the form of stone axe-heads, “unwieldy and probably quite useless objects” found by Mr. Haddon in the chain of isles south-east of New Guinea. Mr. Romilly and Dr. Wyatt Gill attest the existence of similar axes of ceremony. “They are not intended for cleaving timber.” We see “the metamorphosis of a practical object into an unpractical one.” [118]
The forger thus had sources for his great decorated slate spear-head; the smaller specimens may be sketches for that colossal work.
XXX—THE FIGURINES
Dr. Munro writes of “the carved figurines, ‘idols,’ or ‘totems,’ six in number,” four from Dumbuck, one from Langbank. [119a] Now, first, nobody knows the purpose of the rude figurines found in many sites from Japan to Troy, from Russia to the Lake Dwellings of Europe, and in West Africa, where the negroes use these figurines, when found, as “fetish,” knowing nothing of their origin (Man, No. 7, July, 1905). Like a figurine of a woman, found in the Dumbuck kitchen midden, they are discovered in old Japanese kitchen middens. [119b]
The astute forger, knowing that figurines were found in Japanese kitchen middens, knowing it before Y. Koganei published the fact in 1903,
thought the Dumbuck kitchen midden an appropriate place for a figurine. Dr. Munro, possibly less well-informed, regards the bottom of a kitchen midden at Dumbuck as “a strange resting place for a goddess.” [120a] Now, as to “goddess” nobody knows anything. Dr. Schliemann thought that the many figurines of clay, in Troy, were meant for Hera and Athene. Nobody knows, but every one not wholly ignorant sees the absurdity of speaking of figurines as “totems”; of course the term is not Dr. Munro’s.
We know not their original meaning, but they occur “all over the place”; in amber on the Baltic coast, with grotesque faces carved in amber. In Russia and Finland, and in sites of prehistoric Egypt, on slate, and in other materials such grotesques are common. [120b] Egypt is a great centre of the Early Slate School of Art, the things ranging from slate plaques covered with disorderly scratchings “without a conscience or an aim,” to highly decorated palettes. There is even a perforated object like the slate crooks of M. Cartailhac, from Portugal, but rather more like the silhouette of a
bird, [121a] and there are decorative mace-heads in soft stone. [121b] Some of the prehistoric figurines of human beings from Egypt are studded with “cups,” cupules, écuelles, or whatever we may be permitted to name them. In short, early and rude races turn out much the same set of crude works of art almost everywhere, and the extraordinary thing is, not that a few are found in a corner of Britain, but that scarce any have been found.
